“Too little, too late, I fear. We have lost the planet, either way.”

He dipped his gravfighter’s nose and accelerated.

He wasn’t quite “down to the deck,” as he’d reported, but close enough. The Starhawk was dropping now past the twenty-kilometer mark. The sky above was still space-dark, the brightest stars—Arcturus, especially—still gleaming and brilliant, but the cloud decks below rose thick and towering, their tops sculpted by high-altitude winds and tinted red and gold by the rising sun. He’d crossed enough of the planet’s face that the local sun was well above the horizon now, casting long, blue-purple shadows and hazy shafts of golden light across the distinctly three-dimensional surface of the cloudscape below.

Gray adjusted his ship’s hull-form again, sculpting it for high-speed aerial flight, absorbing the deep entry keel and extending the wings farther and deeper into their forward-canted configuration. Behind him, a sudden burst of shooting stars marked another cloud of sand or debris entering atmosphere, a barrage of silent flick-flick-flicks of light.

He let his AI target on the Marine beacon, bringing the SG-92’s prow left across the horizon, then dipping down into a plunging dive. He opened his com suite to the Marine frequency and began sending out an approach vector clearance request.

He hadn’t crossed seventy-one AUs and survived a near-miss by a thermonuke to get shot down by the damned jarheads.

Copyright

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street,

London SE1 9GF

www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk

First published in the US by EOS 2010

Copyright © William H. Keith, Jr 2010

William H. Keith, Jr asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Cover art by Gregory Bridges

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

FIRST EDITION

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780007482948

Ebook Edition © September 2012 ISBN: 9780007482955

Version 2019-01-09

For Brea, who has seen me through many, many light years

Table of Contents

Too little, too late, I fear

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Author’s Note

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Epilogue

By Ian Douglas

About the Publisher

Author’s Note

Readers of the Galactic Marines series may wonder at first why the background for Earth Strike seems so different from the universe of Heritage, Legacy, and Inheritance. Where are the Xul, the Builders, the Marine Corps families and traditions extending across two millennia?

There’s a simple explanation. Earth Strike is the opening volley of a completely new military-SF series, Star Carrier, which explores the lives of Navy combat fighter pilots of the far future. Welcome aboard the Star Carrier America as she faces a new and deadly threat to Earth and all of humankind.

I hope you enjoy the cruise!

Ian Douglas

December 2009

Prologue

25 September 2404

TC/USNA CVS America

Emergence, Eta Boötean Kuiper Belt

32 light years from Earth

0310 hours, TFT

The sky twisted open in a storm of tortured photons, and the Star Carrier America dropped through into open space.

She was … enormous, by far the largest mobile construct ever built by humankind, a titanic mushroom shape, the kilometer-long stem shadowed behind the immense, hemispherical cap that was both reaction mass and radiation shielding. Her twin counter-rotating hab rings turned slowly in the shadows. Swarms of probes and recon ships emerged from her launch tubes, minnows streaking out into wan sunlight from the bulk of a whale.

Around her, the other vessels of the America Battlegroup emerged from the enforced isolation of metaspace as well, some having bled down to sublight velocities minutes before, others appearing moment by moment as their emitted and reflected light reached America’s sensors. Some members of the battlegroup had scattered as far as five AUs from the star carrier in realspace, and would not again rejoin her communications net for as much as forty more minutes.

The ship’s pitted and sandblasted forward shield caught the wan glow of a particularly brilliant star—the sun of this system nearly seventy-one astronomical units distant. The data now flooding America’s sensors were almost nine and a half hours old.

Within his electronic cocoon on the America’s Combat Information Center, the Battlegroup Commander linked in through the ship’s neural net, watching the data scroll past his in-head display.

STAR: Eta Boötis

COORDINATES: RA: 13h 54m 41.09s Dec: +18? 23’ 52.5” D 11.349p

ALTERNATE NAMES: Mufrid, Muphrid, Muphride, Saak, Boötis 8 (Flamsteed)

TYPE: GO IV

MASS: 1.6 Sol; RADIUS: 2.7 Sol; LUMINOSITY: 9 Sol

SURFACE TEMPERATURE: ~6100oK

AGE: 2.7 billion years

APPARENT MAGNITUDE (SOL): 2.69; Absolute magnitude: 2.38

DISTANCE FROM SOL: 37 ly

BINARY COMPANION: White dwarf, mean orbit: 1.4 AU; period: 494 d

PLANETARY SYSTEM: 14 planets, including 9 Jovian and sub-Jovian bodies, 5 rocky/terrestrial planets, plus 35 dwarf planets and 183 known satellites, plus numerous planetoids and cometary bodies …

Rear Admiral Alexander Koenig was, in particular, interested in the planetary data for just one of the worlds circling that distant gold-hued star: Eta Boötis IV, known formally as Al Haris al Sama, informally as Haris, and more often and disparagingly within the fleet as “Ate a Boot.”

“God,” he said as he watched the planetary data unfold. “What a mess.”

America’s AI did not reply, having learned long ago that human statements of surprise or disgust generally did not require a reply.

Eta Boötis IV was not even remotely Earthlike in atmosphere or environment—greenhouse-hot with a deadly, poisonous atmosphere—a wet Venus, someone had called it. What the Arabs had seen in the place when they put down a research station there was anybody’s guess.

As the America’s computer net built up models of the sensor data, it became clear that the enemy fleet was already there, as expected, orbiting the planet—or, rather, that they’d been there when the electromagnetic radiation and neutrinos emitted by them had begun the journey over nine hours ago. It was a good bet that they were there still, circling in on Gorman’s Marines. America’s delicate sensors could detect the hiss and crack of EMP—the telltale fingerprints of nuclear detonations and particle beam fire—even across the gulf of more than seventy AUs.

“All stations, we have acquired Objective Mike-Red,” the fleet commander said. “Launch ready-one fighters.”

The America had a long reach indeed.

And now she was going to prove it.

Chapter One

25 September 2404

VFA-44 Dragonfires

Eta Boötis System

0311 hours, TFT

Lieutenant Trevor Gray watched the numbers dwindle from ten to zero on his IHD, as the Starhawk’s AI counted them off. He was in microgravity at the moment, deep within the carrier’s hub core, but that would be changing very soon, now.

“Three …” the female voice announced, a murmur in his ear, “two … one … launch.”

Acceleration pressed him back into the yielding foam of his seat, a monster hand bearing down on chest and lungs until breathing deeply was nearly impossible. At seven gravities, vision dimmed…

… then flashed back as the crushing sensation of weight abruptly vanished. It took the Starhawk 2.39 seconds to traverse the two-hundred-meter cat-launch tube, and as it emerged into open space it was traveling at just over 167 meters per second relative to the drifting America.

“Blue Omega Seven, clear,” he announced.

“Omega Eight, clear,” another voice echoed immediately. Lieutenant Katie Tucker, his wing, was somewhere off his starboard side, launched side-by-side with him through the twin launch tubes.

He brought up an aft view in time to see the rapidly receding disk of the America’s shield cap dwindling away at over six hundred kilometers per hour. In seconds, the dull, silver-white shield had fallen astern to a bright dot … and then even that winked out, vanished among the stars. Icy and remote, those stars gleamed hard and unblinking across night; the other fighters of VFA-44, even the other capital ships of the Confederation fleet, all were lost in dark emptiness.

“Imaging, full view forward.”

The view from his SG-92 Starhawk’s cockpit was purely digital illusion, of course. At his command, the aft view projected across the curving inner surface of his cockpit vanished, replaced by different stars. One, directly ahead, gleamed with an intense golden brilliance—the local sun, though it was too distant to show a disk.

To port and low, another gold-red star shone almost as brilliantly—twice as bright as Venus at its brightest, seen from Earth. That, Gray knew from his briefings, was the star Arcturus, just three light years away.

Arcturus, however, was not his problem. Not anymore.

And not yet.

“Imaging,” he said. “Squadron ships.”

Green-glowing, diamond-shaped icons appeared on the stellar panorama, above, below, and to the left, each attended by a string of alphanumerics giving ship number and pilot id, and Gray felt just a little less lonely. Eight other Starhawks besides his drifted in the void out there, their AIs nudging them now into a ring ten kilometers across. As the minutes passed, three more strike-fighters moved up from astern, taking their places with the squadron.

The formation was complete.

“Okay, chicks,” Commander Marissa Allyn said over the squadron comnet. She was VFA-44’s CO, and Flight Leader for this op. “Configure for high-G.”

Each of the Starhawks had emerged from the diamagnetic launch tubes in standard flight configuration, a night-black needle shape twenty meters long, with a central bulge housing the pilot and control systems, and the mirror-smooth outer hull in a superconducting state. At Gray’s command, his gravfighter began reshaping itself, the complex nanolaminates of its outer structure dissolving and recombining, drive units and weapons and sensors folding up and out and back, everything building up around the central bulge in a blunt and smoothly convoluted egg-shape with a slender spike tail off the narrow end, and with the fat end aligned with the distant, golden gleam of Eta Boötis.

“Blue Omega Leader, Omega Seven,” he reported. “Sperm mode engaged. Ready for boost.” Gravfighter pilots claimed their craft looked like huge spermatozoa when they were in boost configuration. His Starhawk was now only seven meters long—not counting the field bleed spike astern—and five wide, though it still massed twenty-two tons.

“America CIC, this is Alpha Strike Blue Omega One,” Allyn said. “Handing off from PriFly. All Blues clear of the ship and formed up. Ready to initiate PL boost.”

“Copy, Blue Omega One,” a voice replied from America’s Combat Information Center. “Primary Flight Control confirms handoff to America CIC. You are clear for high-grav boost.”

“Acknowledge squadron clear for boost,” Allyn said. “Don’t forget about us out there, America.”

“Don’t worry, Blue Omega. We’ll be on your asses all the way in.”

That wasn’t quite true, Gray thought. According to the operations plan, the task force would be following, but it would be another eighteen hours, total, before they reached the target planet.

The squadron would be on its own until then.

“Blue Omega Strike, Omega One,” Allyn said over the squadron’s tac channel. “Engage squadron taclink.”

Gray focused a thought, and felt an answering sensation of pressure in the palm of his left hand. The twelve fighter craft were connected now by laser-optic comnet feeds linking their on-board AIs into a single electronic organism.

“And gravitic boost at fifty kay,” Allyn continued, “in three … two … one … punch it!”

A gravitational singularity opened up immediately ahead of Gray’s Starhawk.

He was falling.

In fact, he was accelerating now at fifty thousand gravities, falling toward the artificial singularity projected ahead of his gravfighter, but since the high-G field affected every atom of the Starhawk and of Lieutenant Gray uniformly, he was not reduced to a thin organic smear across the aft surfaces of the cockpit. In fact, he felt nothing whatsoever beyond the usual and somewhat pleasant falling sensation of zero gravity.

Outwardly, there was no indication that within the first ten seconds of engaging the gravitic drive, he was traveling at five hundred kilometers per second relative to the America, his speed increasing by half a million meters per second with each passing second. The stars remained steady and unmoving, unwinking in the night.

After one minute he’d be traveling at three thousand kilometers per second, or 1 percent of the speed of light.

And in ten minutes he’d be pushing hard against c itself.

In strike fighter combat, speed is everything.

CIC, TC/USNA CVS America

Eta Boötean Kuiper Belt

0312 hours, TFT

Admiral Alexander Koenig watched the slowly growing green sphere of local battlespace, now four light minutes across and still growing. Perhaps half of Battlegroup America was accounted for now. The others were out there, but scattered so far by the uncertainties of pinpoint navigation across interstellar distances that the information heralding their emergence from metaspace wouldn’t arrive for some time yet.

The America’s Combat Information Center, located just aft of the bridge, was large, but had a tightly packed, almost cluttered feel. Located at the carrier’s hub, it was designed to function in microgravity. CIC personnel were tucked into workstations that let them link electronically with the ship and with other stations. Curving bulkheads and the shallow dome of the overhead displayed seamless images of the sky surrounding the huge ship, relayed from CCD scanners on the rim of the shield cap forward. The local space display was on the stage at the center of the compartment, just below Koenig’s station. By moving his hand within the glowing and insubstantial console projected in front of him, he could rotate the sphere and enlarge a portion of it, checking the ID alphanumerics.

Altogether, some twenty-seven ships made up the task force, including heavy cruisers and a battleship, four destroyers, half a dozen frigates, a small flotilla of supply and repair vessels, and a detachment of eight troop transports, all empty. Of all of those, only nine ships were linked in so far.

Ah! Good. The railgun cruiser Kinkaid was visible now, two light minutes abeam, at 184 degrees relative. They would need the Kinky’s massive kinetic-kill firepower if this op degenerated into a fleet action … and Koenig was certain that it would. And the destroyers Kaufman and Puller were on-line now as well. They would be vital if—no, when—the Turusch va Sh’daar spotted the battlegroup and deployed their heavy fighters to meet it.

That made eleven so far.

A gangly, long-legged shadow swam across the scattering of stars against the overhead dome, backlit by the gold gleam of Eta Boötis. John Quintanilla, the battlegroup’s Political Liaison, floated upside-down, from Koenig’s perspective, clinging to the back of the admiral’s couch.

“Shouldn’t we be accelerating or something?” the civilian asked.

“Not until the rest of the battlegroup forms up with us,” Koenig replied.

“Your orders from the Senate Military Directorate,” Quintanilla said, his voice low, “require you to reach Gorman’s force in the shortest time possible. Time is critical! He can’t hold out very much longer.”

“I am very much aware of that, Mr. Quintanilla.”

“Those fighters you launched aren’t going to have much of a chance against a Turusch war fleet. Your orders—”

“My orders, Mr. Quintanilla,” Koenig snapped, “include the requirement to keep my battlegroup intact … or as intact as combat allows.” Koenig moved his hand, calling up an AI-generated image of the planet nine and a half light hours ahead, outlined in green lines of latitude and longitude. “We will not help General Gorman if we piss away the ships of this battlegroup a few at a time!”

“But—”

“This is what’s waiting for us in there, Mr. Quintanilla,” Koenig said, interrupting. The sphere at the center of the CIC display enlarged sharply, and a number of red pinpoints sprang into sharp relief against the green background. Each red dot was accompanied by alphanumerics showing mass, vector, and probable id.

“Fifty-five vessels that we’ve been able to detect so far,” Koenig told him. “So far. There are, no doubt, others on the far side of the planet that we haven’t picked up as yet. We will be seriously outnumbered in this engagement, sir, and I will not divide my fleet in the face of a superior enemy!”

Most of the enemy ships were in orbit around the planet, but a few were farther out, decelerating as they backed down in their approach vectors. The Turusch had definitely arrived in force.

“You know what is best, of course,” Quintanilla said, his face stiff, expressionless. “At least from a tactical perspective. My job is simply to remind you of the … of the political ramifications of your decisions. General Gorman is an extremely important person in the Senate’s estimation. They want him rescued and returned safely.”

Koenig made a face. He detested politics, and he detested playing politics with brave men and women. “Ah. And Gorman’s Marines?”

“Of course, the more Marines you can pick up, the better.”

“I see. And the Mufrids?”

Quintanilla gave him a sharp look. “Certainly, any of the colonists for which you have transport berths can be brought out, especially any with information on Turusch capabilities. But I’ll remind you that General Gorman’s rescue is your prime consideration.”

“I know my orders, Mr. Quintanilla,” Koenig said, his voice cold. “Now … if you’ll excuse me …”

He moved his hand in his workstation’s control field, and the electronic image of Eta Boötis IV vanished again, replaced by the map sphere of space immediately surrounding America and her consorts. More ships were popping up on the display’s expanding battlespace globe, including the Ticonderoga and The Spirit of Confederation, the first a heavy cruiser, the second the task force’s single line-battleship, with heavy kinetic-kill railguns that could pulverize a planet.

Unfortunately, the Confederation task force could not pulverize the planet ahead, not without killing some five thousand Marines of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force and the colonists they’d been deployed to protect.

Quintanilla floated above Koenig’s workstation for a moment longer, then grunted, pushed himself off from the couch, and drifted toward the CIC entrance behind the command dais.

Located beneath Koenig’s station was the section of the CIC known as “the orchestra pit” and, more usually, simply as “the pit.” Twelve workstations nestled within the pit, where America’s CIC officers stood their watches. One of them, Commander Janis Olmstead, the primary weapons control officer, caught Koenig’s eye and arched an eyebrow. “Since when did micromanagement become Navy SOP, sir?” she asked.

“Mind on your links, Weps,” Captain Randolph Buchanan’s electronic avatar said. He was America’s commanding officer, and Koenig’s flag captain. Physically, he was on the bridge next door to CIC, but the compartment’s electronics projected his image to the command dais next to Koenig’s couch.

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

“She’s right, you know,” Koenig told Buchanan, but he texted the words to Buchanan’s screen, rather than speaking them aloud. He would not criticize Buchanan’s running of his ship and crew, not publicly. “It’s not going to be the Sh’daar that defeat us. Or their client races. It’s going to be the damned Confed politics.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Buchanan’s image scowl as the captain read the words on a screen.

“Agreed, Admiral.” The words appeared silently on one of Koenig’s screens a moment later. “I have to tell you, sir, I don’t like this.”

“No,” Koenig typed back. “But we play by the rules we’re given.”

Buchanan seemed to hesitate, and then the avatar looked at Koenig. “How the hell do we fight a galactic empire, Admiral?” he asked aloud.

Damn. Buchanan should have kept the conversation private, exchanging text messagers. Glancing down into the pit, Koenig could see that Olmstead and the others were carefully watching their own link channels and displays, but they’d obviously heard. The conversation would spread throughout the America before the end of the next watch.

“I don’t believe in ‘galactic empires,’” Koenig said. He snorted. “The whole idea is silly, given the size of the galaxy.”

“Well, the Sh’daar appear to believe in the concept, Admiral,” Buchanan’s image said. “And I doubt very much that it matters whether they agree with you on the point or not.”

“When the Sh’daar show themselves,” Koenig replied carefully, “if they show themselves, we’ll worry about galactic empires. Right now, our concern is with the Turusch.”

It had been ninety-two years since humankind had made contact with the Sh’daar, or, more precisely, since they’d made first contact with the Aglestch va Sh’daar, one of an unknown but very large number of technic alien species within what was somewhat melodramatically called the Sh’daar Galactic Empire. Quite early on, the Aglestch—some humans still referred to them as “Canopians,” even though that brilliant, hot F0-class supergiant could not possibly be their home star—had explained that they served the “Galactic Masters,” the Sh’daar.

Then, fifty-five years later, an Aglestch delegation had tentacle-delivered a message to Earth, inscribed in English, Spanish, Russian, and transliterated Lingua Galactica, purportedly from the Sh’daar themselves.

They claimed to be the overlords of a galaxy-spanning civilization. After five and a half decades of peaceful trade between the Confederation and the Agletstch Collective, the Sh’daar now stepped in and “suggested,” with just a hint of velvet-shrouded-mail fist, that the human Confederation submit to them and take their rightful places as a star-faring species—under the hegemony of the Sh’daar Masters.

And until that happened, humans were forbidden to have any contact whatsoever with the Aglestch.

The problem was, in fifty-five years an active and spirited trade had sprung up between the Aglestch worlds and the nearest star systems colonized by humans. StarTek and Galactic Dynamics, the trading corporations involved, hadn’t wanted to give up their lucrative contracts for Agletsch art and basic technical information. A Terran naval task group had been deployed to protect human trade routes in the region, and the Confederation Diplomatic Corps had made overtures to the Aglestch Collective about maintaining trade and diplomatic contact apart from Sh’daar oversight.

The result had been the disastrous Battle of Beta Pictoris, in 2468, the equivalent, in human eyes, of reaching out to shake hands and pulling back a bloody stump.

And for thirty-six years now, the war had continued … with a very few minor victories, and with a very great many major defeats. Humankind’s principle foes so far had been the Turusch va Sh’daar, a different Sh’daar client species that first had made its appearance thirty years before, at the Battle of Rasalhague. The First Interstellar War, as the news agencies had termed it back home, was not going well.

The infant planetary system of Beta Pic had been just sixty-three light years from Sol, the furthest humans had yet ventured from their homeworld, a microscopic step when compared with the presumed extant of the galaxy-spanning Sh’daar. Rasalhague had been closer still—forty-seven light years.

And Eta Boötis was only thirty-seven light years from Sol. The enemy was closing in, relentless, remorseless.

In 2367, the Terran Confederation had incorporated 214 interstellar colonies and perhaps a thousand research and trade outposts on planets scattered across a volume of space roughly one hundred light years across and perhaps eighty deep, a volume embracing almost eight thousand star systems, the majority of which had never even been visited by humans. And after less than four decades of bitter fighting, Confederation territory had dwindled by perhaps a quarter.

Humans still knew almost nothing about the Sh’daar—so far as was known, no human had ever even seen one—but their brief contact with the Agletsch had suggested that the Sh’daar presence might well encompass several hundred billion stars. Whether you called it a galactic empire or something else, in terms of numbers and resources, it seemed to pose an insurmountable threat.

The sheer impossibility of the Confederation fighting such an overwhelmingly vast and far-flung galactic power had strongly affected human culture and government, deeply dividing both, and affecting the entire Confederation with a kind of social depression, a plummeting morale that was difficult to combat, difficult to shoulder.

And one symptom of plunging morale was the increasing micromanagement out of C³—Confederation Central Command—on Earth. All military vessels now carried one or more Senate liaisons, like Quintanilla, to make certain the Senate’s orders were properly carried out.

If anything, direct Senate oversight of the military had made the morale problem even worse.

And that was why Koenig was concerned about his flag captain speaking his pessimism in front of the bridge personnel.

“We’ll know more when we rescue Gorman and his people,” Koenig added after a thoughtful pause, stressing the word when, rejecting the word if. “The scuttlebutt is that his Marines captured some Tush officers. If so, that could give us our first real insight into the enemy psychology since this damned war began.”

“Tush” or “Tushie” was military slang for the Turusch … one of the cleaner of a number of popular epithets. He saw Olmstead’s head come up in surprise at hearing a flag officer use that kind of language.

“Yes, sir,” Buchanan said.

“So we play it by the op plan,” Koenig added, speaking with a confidence he didn’t really feel but which he hoped sounded inspiring. “We go in, kick Trash ass, and pull our people and their prisoners out of there. Then we hightail for Earth and let the damned politicians know that the Galactics can be beaten.”

He grinned at Buchanan’s avatar. He suspected that the Captain had spoken aloud specifically to give Koenig a chance to say something inspiring. A cheap and theatrical trick, but he wasn’t going to argue with the psychology. The crew was nervous—they knew what they were in for at Eta Boötis—and hearing their admiral’s confidence, even an illusion of confidence, was critical.

On the battlespace display, five more ships appeared—the destroyer Andreyev, the frigates Doyle, Milton, and Wyecoff, and the troopship Bristol.

They would be ready to accelerate for the inner system soon.

VFA-44 Dragonfires

Eta Boötis System

0421 hours, TFT

Lieutenant Gray checked his time readouts, both of them. Time—the time as measured back on board America—was, as expected, flashing past at an insane pace, thirteen times faster, in fact, than it was passing for him.

In its high-G sperm-mode configuration, the SG-92 Starhawk’s quantum-gravitic projectors focused an artificial curvature of spacetime just ahead of the ship’s rounded prow—in effect creating a gravitational singularity that moved ahead of the fighter, pulling it forward at dizzying accelerations.

Accelerating at 50,000 gravities had boosted his Starhawk to near-light velocity in ten minutes. For the next hour, then, he’d been coasting at .997 c … except that the mathematics of time dilation reduced the time actually experienced on board the hurtling fighter to 0.077402 of that—or exactly four minutes, thirty-eight point six seconds.

Put another way, for every minute experienced by Trevor Gray in his tiny sealed universe of metal and plastic, almost thirteen minutes slipped past in the non-accelerated world outside. Since launching from the America, the Blue Omega fighter wing had traveled over a billion kilometers, nearly eight astronomical units, in what seemed like less than ten minutes.

Through the Starhawk’s optics, the universe outside looked very strange indeed.

Directly ahead and astern and to either side, there was nothing, a black and aching absence of light. All of the stars of the sky appeared to have been compressed into a frosty ring of light forward by the gravfighter’s near-c velocity. Even Eta Boötis itself, directly ahead, had been reshaped into a tight, bright circle.

And, despite the expectations of physicists from centuries ago, there was a starbow—a gentle shading of color, blue to deep violet at the leading edge of the starlight ring, and deep reds trailing. Theoretically, the starlight should all have appeared white, since visible light Doppler-shifted into invisibility would be replaced by formerly invisible wavelengths. In practice, though, the light of individual stars was smeared somewhat by the shifting wavelengths, creating the color effect known as the starbow.

Gray could have, had he wished, ordered the gravfighter’s AI to display the sky corrected for his speed, but he preferred the soft rainbow hues. Most fighter pilots did.

When the fighter was under acceleration, the sky ahead looked even stranger. Gravitational lensing twisted the light of stars directly ahead into a solid, bright ring around the invisible pseudomass in front of the ship, even when the craft was still moving at nonrelativistic speeds. For now, though, the effect was purely an artifact of the Starhawk’s speed—an illusion similar to what happened when you flew a skyflitter into a rainstorm, where the rain appeared to sleet back at an angle even when it was in fact falling vertically. In this case, it was photons appearing to sleet backward, creating the impression that the entire sky was crowded into that narrow, glowing ring ahead.

He checked the time again. Two minutes had passed for him, and almost half an hour for the rest of the universe.

He felt … lonely.

Technically, his fighter was still laser taclinked with the other eleven Starhawks of Blue Omega Flight, but communication between ships at near-c was difficult due to the severely Dopplered distortions in surrounding spacetime. The other fighters should be exactly matched in course and speed, but their images, too, were smeared into that light ring forward because their light, too, was traveling just three thousandths of a percent faster than Gray’s ship. Some low-level bandwidth could be held open over the laser channels for AI coordination, but that was about it. No voice. No vid. No avatars.

Just encircling darkness, Night Absolute, and the Starbow ahead.

The hell of it was, Gray was a loner. With his history, he damned near had to be. By choice he didn’t hang out much with the other pilots in the ready room or flight officers’ lounge. When he did, there was the inevitable comment about his past, about where he’d come from … and then he would throw a punch and end up getting written up by Allyn, and maybe even getting pulled from the flight line.

Better by far to stay clear of the other pilots entirely, and avoid the hassle.

But now, when the laws of physics stepped in like God Almighty to tell him he couldn’t communicate with the others, he found he missed them. The banter. The radio chatter.

The reassurance that there were, in fact, eleven human souls closer than eight astronomical units away.

He could, of course, have called the avatars of any or all of the others. Copies of their PAs—their Personal Assistants—resided within his fighter’s AI memory. He could hold a conversation with any of them and be completely unaware that he was speaking to software, not a living person … and he would know that the software would report the conversation with perfect fidelity to the person when the comnet channels opened later on.

But avatars weren’t the same. For some it was, but not for Trevor Gray.

Not for a Prim.

He closed his eyes, remembering the last time. He’d been in the lounge of the Worldview, a civilian bar adjacent to the spaceport at the SupraQuito space elevator. He and Rissa Schiff had been sitting in the view blister, just talking, with Earth an unimaginably beautiful and perfect sphere of ocean-blue and mottled cloud-white gleaming against the night. The two had been in civilian clothing, which, as it turned out, had been lucky for him. Lieutenants Jen Collins and Howie Spaas had walked up, loud and uninvited, also in civvies, and both blasted on recs.

“Geez, Schiffie,” Collins had said, her voice a nasal sneer. “You hang around with a Prim loser like this perv, you’re gonna get a bad name.” Spaas had snickered.

Gray had stood, his fists clenched, but he’d kept a lid on it. Allyn had lectured him about that the last time he’d gotten into trouble with other squadron officers … the need to let the insults slide off. The shipboard therapist she’d sent him to had said the same thing. Other people could hurt him, could get through his shields only if he let them.

“Who asked you, bitch?” Gray had said quietly.

“Ooh, I’m afraid,” Spaas said, grinning. “Hey, Riss … you need to be careful around creeps like this. A fucking Prim monogie. You’re never gonna get any …”

It had been worth it, decking Spaas. It really had. It had been worth having the Shore Patrol show up, worth the off-duty restriction to quarters for a week, worth the extra watches, even worth the searing new asshole the skipper had given him. Commander Allyn could have put him up for court martial, but she’d chosen to give him a good old-fashioned ass-chewing instead.

He still remembered that next morning in her office. “The Navy appreciates pilots who want to fight, Gray,” she’d told him. “But the idea is to fight the Turusch, not your shipmates. You hear me? You have one more chance. Blow it and you get busted back to the real Navy.”

Prim monogie.

Yeah, it had been worth it.

Chapter Two

25 September 2404

CIC, TC/USNA CVS America

Eta Boötean Kuiper Belt

0428 hours, TFT

Admiral Koenig took a final look at the heavens revealed through the encircling viewalls of America’s CIC. Eta Boötis gleamed in amber splendor directly ahead. Off to port, red-golden Arcturus shone as well—not as brilliantly as Eta Boötis, but still with twice the brightness of Venus as seen from Earth at its closest.

Someday, we’ll make it back there, Koenig thought, gazing for a moment at Arcturus, just three light years distant. He still felt the bitterness of that last, desperate fight at Arcturus Station last year.

That was for later. Right now, it was Mufrid that required his full attention.

Two of the naval transports never had checked in … which might mean they’d suffered malfunction or disaster en route from Sol, or, more likely, that they’d emerged from Alcubierre Drive more than 1.3 light hours from the America.

It would be the transports, he thought—the entire reason for coming to Eta Boötis in the first place. Still, if they’d made it this far, they would follow the task force in. Gray couldn’t hold up the mission any longer waiting for them.

Over the course of the past eighty minutes, the task force had been pulling slowly together, until most occupied a rough sphere half a million kilometers across. All were now electronically connected through the laser-link tacnet, though the most distant vessels would lag fifteen minutes behind in receiving any message from the flagship.

“Captain Buchanan,” Koenig said, “you may inform the ship that we are about to get under way.”

“Aye, aye, Admiral,” Buchanan’s voice replied immediately.

It was a formality. All hands had been at maneuvering stations since their arrival in-system. The announcement went out silently, spoken through each person’s in-head e-links. “Now hear this, now hear this. All hands, prepare for immediate acceleration under Alcubierre Drive.”

“Make to all vessels on the net,” Koenig told the ship’s AI. “Engage Alcubierre Drive, acceleration five hundred gravities, on my mark … and three … two … one … mark!”

That mark was variable, depending on how long it took for the lasercom command to crawl across emptiness from the America. The massive carrier began moving forward first, accompanied by the heavy cruiser Pauli and the frigates Psyché and Chengdu, close abeam. One by one the other vessels began falling into train, the sphere slowly elongating into an egg shape as more and more vessels got the word and engaged their drives.

The principles of the Alcubierre Drive had been laid down by a Mexican physicist in the last years of the twentieth century. It was old tech compared to the artificial singularities employed by modern gravfighters, but it used the same principles. Essentially, drive projectors compressed spacetime ahead of each vessel, and expanded spacetime astern, creating a bubble in the fabric of space that could move forward at any velocity, ignoring the usual constraints imposed by the speed of light because everything within the bubble, imbedded in that patch of spacetime, was motionless compared to the space around it.

Practical considerations—both size and mass—limited Alcubierre acceleration to five hundred gravities. At that rate, America would be pushing the speed of light after sixteen hours, thirty-seven minutes.

However, after that length of time they would have traveled almost sixty astronomical units, which meant they wouldn’t have time to decelerate in to the target.

Instead, they would accelerate constantly for just over nine hours, at which point they’d be moving at .54 c, then reverse their drives and decelerate for the same period.

They would arrive in the vicinity of Eta Boötis IV ten hours after fighter wing Blue Alpha had engaged the enemy.

And until that time, Blue Omega Strike Force would be fighting the enemy alone.

VFA-44 Dragonfires

Eta Boötis System

1015 hours, TFT

For Trevor Gray, half an hour passed. In the universe outside, six and a half hours slipped away, and with them another 7 billion kilometers, or forty-six more astronomical units.

He was just over three quarters of the way to the target.

He wondered how the other eleven pilots of the squadron were doing … but shrugged off the question. His AI would alert him if the tenuous data link with another fighter snapped. That hadn’t happened yet, so the chances were good that the others all were out there, as bored and, paradoxically, as nervous as he was.

In another eleven subjective minutes, he would begin the deceleration phase of the strike, but that would be handled by his AI. Coordination of the timing within the flight of twelve gravfighters had to be exact, or they would drop down to combat speed scattered all over the sky, rather than in attack formation.

He spent the time studying the world now just two and a half light hours ahead.

His AI had last updated his target data from America’s CIC just before the squadron had boosted, which meant that his information about the enemy’s strength and dispositions around Eta Boötis were now a full seventeen hours out of date. That was the tricky aspect to near-c deployment; once you boosted to relativistic speeds, you couldn’t be exactly sure of what you were getting into until you were nearly there.

His Starhawk’s forward sensors, at this speed, were all but useless. Radiation from ships around Eta Boötis IV was strongly distorted both by relativistic effects and by the “dustcatcher,” a high-gravity zone maintained ahead of the fighter at near-c even when the ship wasn’t accelerating, to trap or deflect dust and gas in the gravfighter’s path. Any information that made it to the fighter’s sensors was lost in the light-smeared ring representing the star dead ahead.

According to the most recent electronic intelligence, though, there were fifty-five ships there—almost certainly all Turusch—orbiting Eta Boötis IV or on final approach. And there was a way to slightly improve the view.

He moved his hands within the control field. On the mirrored black surface of his Starhawk, three sensor masts detached from the hull and swung out and forward, each two meters long at the start, but unfolding, stretching, and growing to reach a full ten meters from the ship. The receivers at the ends of the masts, spaced equidistant around the fighter, extended far enough out to let them look past the nebulous haze of the dustcatcher. As Gray watched, the inner circle of light on the cockpit display grew sharper and brighter. Incoming radiation was still being distorted by the Starhawk’s velocity, of course, but now he could see past the distortion of the singularity, and even take advantage of the dustcatcher’s gravitational lensing effect.

Bright flashes silently popped and flared across the display now, however. Extended, the sensor masts were striking random bits of debris—hydrogen atoms, mostly, adrift in the not-quite-perfect vacuum of space and made deadly by the gravfighter’s speed. Impact at this speed with something as massive as a meteoric grain of sand could destroy the mast; his AI had to work quickly.

The data came up less than five seconds later, and with a feeling of relief Gray retracted the sensor masts back into the hull, safe behind the blurring distortion of the dustcatcher. The fighter’s artificial intelligence had sampled the incoming radiation, sorting through high-energy photons to build a coherent picture of what lay ahead.

Resolution was poor. Only a few ship-sized targets—the most massive—could be separated from the distortion-induced static. The AI did its best to match up the handful of targets it could see now with those that had been visible to America’s sensors hours earlier. By combining the America data with this fresh, if limited, glimpse, the AI could make a close guess at the orbits of a few of the enemy vessels, and predict where they would be—assuming no changes in orbit—in another 136-plus minutes, objective.

Fifteen targets. Gray had hoped there would be more, but it was something with which to work. Fifteen large starships appeared to be in stable, predictable orbits around the target world, their orbital data precise enough to allow a clear c-shot at them. Of those fifteen, six, the data predicted, would be on the far side of the target planet 136 objective minutes from now, so they were off the targeting list. The remaining nine, however, were fair game.

The actual targeting and munitions launch were handled automatically by the AI-net, requiring only Gray’s confirmation for launch. So long as there was no override from Commander Allyn, all eleven Starhawks would be contributing to the PcB, the Pre-engagement c Bombardment.

Release would be at a precisely calculated instant just before deceleration. He checked the time readouts again. Five minutes, twelve seconds subjective to go.

He worked for a time trying to get a clearer look at the objective. The visual image was blurred, grainy, and heavily pixilated, but he could make out the planet, Eta Boötis IV, sectioned off by green lines of longitude and latitude, the shapes of continents roughed in. Fifteen red blips hung in space about the globe, most so close they appeared to be just skimming the globe’s surface, and he could see their motions, second to second, as the AI updated their locations. A white blip on the surface marked the objective—General Gorman’s slender beachhead. It was on the side of the planet facing Gray at the moment, the planet’s night side, away from the local sun, but in another two hours objective, it would be right on the planet’s limb—local dawn.

Additional red blips flicked on, a cloud of them, indistinct and uncertain, centered around and over Gorman’s position. Those marked enemy targets for which there was no orbital data and that most likely were actively attacking the Marine perimeter. Or rather, they had been 136 minutes ago, when the photons revealing their positions had left Eta Boötis IV. For all Gray knew, the perimeter had collapsed hours ago, and the squadron was about to make a useless demonstration at best, fly into a trap at worst. He shoved the thought aside. They were committed, had been committed since boosting clear of the America. They would know the worst in another few subjective minutes.

He opened his fighter’s library, calling up the ephemeris for Eta Boötis and its planets. He scrolled quickly through the star data, then slowed when he reached the entry for the fourth planet.

PLANET: Eta Boötis IV

NAME: Al Haris al Sama, (Arabic) “Guardian of Heaven”; Haris; Mufrid.

TYPE: Terrestrial/rocky; sulfur/reducing

MEAN ORBITAL RADIUS: 2.95 AU; Orbital period: 4y 2d 1h

INCLINATION: 85.3 ; ROTATIONAL PERIOD: 14h 34m 22s

MASS: 1.8 Earth; EQUATORIAL DIAMETER: 24,236 km = 1.9 Earth

MEAN PLANETARY DENSITY: 5.372 g/cc = .973 Earth

SURFACE GRAVITY: 1.85 G

SURFACE TEMPERATURE RANGE: ~30ºC – 60ºC.

SURFACE ATMOSPHERIC PRESSURE: ~1300 mmHg

PERCENTAGE COMPOSITION: CO₂ 30.74; SO₂ 16.02; SO₃ 14.11; NH₄ 13.63; OCS 12.19; N₂ 5.55; O₂ 3.85; CH3 2.7; Ar 0.2; CS₂ variable; others <800 ppm

AGE: 2.7 billion years

BIOLOGY: C, N, H, S₈, O, Se, H₂O, CS₂, OCN; SESSILE PHOTOLITHOAUTOTROPHS IN REDUCING ATMOSPHERE SYMBIOTIC WITH VARIOUS MOBILE CHEMOORGANOHETEROTROPHS AND CHEMOSYNTHETIC LITHOVORES …

Gray broke off reading at that point, shaking his head. The squadron had been briefed on the native life forms on Haris, but he’d bleeped past the recorded lectures. He wouldn’t be on the planet long enough to worry about any native life forms.

Hell, from what he had picked up at the briefing, it was mildly bizarre that there was any life on the rock at all. One point seven billion years ago, the stellar companion of Eta Boötis had burned up its hydrogen fuel stores and entered a red giant phase before collapsing to its current white dwarf state. Planet IV had probably formed farther out than its current orbit within the star’s habitable zone, but migrated in closer as friction with the outer layers of the red giant’s atmosphere both baked it dry and slowed it down. The current ecosystem could not have even begun evolving until about a billion years ago … an impossibly short time by cosmological standards.

Whatever was growing on Haris’s surface wasn’t going to be very bright. In fact, the chances that it would find humans tasty, or even interesting, were vanishingly remote.

Gray shrugged the news off. He was a fighter pilot, not a ground-pounding grunt. His only view of Harisian biology would be from space, which was perfect, so far as he was concerned.

The subjective minutes ground slowly along, as objective minutes and kilometers streamed past at a breakneck gallop.

“Deceleration in one minute, subjective,” the AI’s voice announced in Gray’s head. “Confirm A-7 strike package release command at deceleration.” It was a woman’s voice, sultry, attention-commanding.

“Strike package release order confirmed,” Gray replied.

Another minute crawled past. Then, “Deceleration with strike package release in five … four … three … two … one … release. Commence deceleration.”

At the precisely calculated release point, a portion of the Starhawk’s outer hull turned liquid, flowed open, and exposed a teardrop-shaped missile nestled within. The fighter’s AI fired the missile, then triggered the spacetime-twisting immensity of the drive singularity, this time astern, off the Starhawk’s spiked tail. At fifty thousand gravities, the Starhawk began slowing; the strike package pod kept accelerating and, from the gravfighter’s perspective, flashed forward at five hundred kilometers per second squared, the dustcatcher winking out just long enough for the teardrop to flash past unimpeded, before switching on once more.

Ten seconds later, the gravfighter’s velocity had slowed by five thousand kilometers per second. After a minute, he was down to .87 of the speed of light, and his velocity continued to decrease.

Six hundred thousand kilometers ahead, the strike package, still accelerating and moving at better than .997 c, began to deploy.

At this point on the timeline, the Turusch at the planet half an AU up ahead would still be unaware that the Confederation task force had even arrived.

They were in for one hell of a surprise.

Tactician Emphatic Blossom at Dawn

Enforcer Radiant Severing

1241 hours, TFT

Emphatic Blossom at Dawn had been named for a species of hydrogen floater on the homeworld that stunned its prey with an electric charge fired through trailing, gelatinous tentacles … emphatic indeed. It was a tactician, and a gurgled suffix on the Turusch sound-pulse translated as “tactician” carried the added meaning of a deep tactician … very roughly the equivalent of a general or an admiral in the enemy’s fleet.

The phrase Emphatic Blossom at Dawn also implied stealth, relentless determination, and a sudden strike at the end, all qualities of mind that had contributed to its being designated a deep tactician.

There was little stealth involved in this operation, however. The enemy was hemmed in on the planet’s surface, huddled beneath its enclosing force-bubble as Turusch particle beams and thermonuclear warheads flared and thundered. For nearly thirty g’nyuu’m now, the Turusch fleet had been hammering that shield, and it was showing signs of imminent failure.

Victory was simply a matter of time.

“Tactician!” a communicator throbbed from a console-shelf overhead. “Enemy ships, range twelve thousand lurm’m!”

The news chilled … and excited. Emphatic Blossom had hoped the enemy would deploy its fleet. At that range, it would have taken light nearly five g’nyuu’m to reach the fleet’s sensors. And that meant—

“All vessels!” the Tactician pulsed. “Disengage from the enemy! Power deep! Ships in orbit, change vector now!”

Everything depended now on the Turusch hunterforce having the time to change course and speed. The enemy force would have launched their fighters within moments of dropping out of superluminal drive, which meant that those fighters, and any kinetic-kill devices they’d released along the way, would be just behind the light-speed wavefront bearing the news of the enemy’s arrival.

How fast were the approaching kinetic devices traveling, how close on the heels of light? How far behind them were the enemy fighters? That depended on the enemy’s technology—how fast they could accelerate—as well as on how quickly Turusch scanners had detected the enemy fleet in the first place. Five light-g’nyuu’m were a great depth. Many, many g’nya might have passed before Turusch scanners—or even the automated systems they controlled—had noticed the enemy’s arrival. How long had they been out there?

Blossom felt the kick of acceleration as the Turusch command hunter Extirpating Enigma increased speed, breaking free of synchronous orbit, and with it an answering surge of relief. If the enemy had targeted the Extirpating Enigma several g’nyurm ago, while still en route, their missiles would miss the command ship now.

Unfortunately, Emphatic Blossom’s warning would take time to reach the other ships. Some of them might detect the threat in time and act independently, but independence of action, independence of thought were decidedly not imperatives in Turusch tactical planning.

But it was vital that the command ship survive any opening kinetic barrage by the enemy. By boosting clear of a predictable orbit, they had—

“Enemy kinetic-kill missile has just passed our tail!” the scanner throbbed. “Speed—”

And then the Languid Depths of Time exploded in a white-hot glare of vaporizing metal.

In another instant, three other Turusch hunterships exploded, and two dazzlingly brilliant stars appeared against the surface of the planet, expanded, blossoming. The claw-transport Victorious Dream of Harmony staggered as a portion of its tail vanished in a flare of silent light, the shock setting the massive vessel into an uncontrolled tumble.

Lasered messages began flashing back to the flagship, speaking of projectiles passing through the fleet at speeds just a mr’uum less than that of light itself.

The hunters had just become the prey.

VFA-44 Dragonfires

Eta Boötis System

1245 hours, TFT

Gray’s Starhawk was still slowing swiftly, still traveling at nearly eighteen thousand kilometers per second—a mere 0.06 c, a snail’s pace compared to typical high-G transit speeds.

In principle, speed in combat was as important as it had ever been in the long-gone era of aerofighters and atmospheric dogfights in the skies above Earth. However, if your closing velocity was too high relative to your opponent, there simply wasn’t time to react, even with electronic senses and AI reaction times. The target was there and gone before you could do a thing about it.

The universe had minutes earlier slipped back into its more usual, low-velocity appearance. Eta Boötis, the star, glared dead ahead, smaller than Sol seen from Earth, but a hair brighter. Other stars gleamed in constellations distorted to Earth-born eyes; Arcturus was a golden beacon high and to the left relative to Gray’s current attitude.

Haris, the target planet, was a tiny crescent close by the star, 1.8 million kilometers distant, growing larger moment by moment.

At Gray’s command, the Starfighter began rearranging itself once again, adopting standard combat configuration—a blade-lean crescent, slender black wings drooping to either side of the thicker central body, the crescent tips stretched forward as if to embrace the enemy. Sleek streamlining wasn’t as necessary at these velocities as it was when plowing through near-vacuum at near-c, but there was always the possibility in these sorts of engagements that a fight would drop into planetary atmosphere, and then streamlining was very necessary indeed.

Minutes earlier, as he dropped past .5 c, Gray had released the dustcatcher, sending a microscopic speck of collected dust and hydrogen atoms compressed into a neutron micro-body hurtling ahead at half the sped of light. If it, by sheer, random chance, hit an enemy spacecraft as it zipped through the system, so much the better, but there was no way to aim it. Like the vaporized whiffs of any A7 strike packages that had missed their targets, the dust balls released by the infalling fighters would remain interstellar navigation hazards for eons to come.

Data flooded across Gray’s navigational and combat displays. As he glanced this across the screen, his in-head display opened windows, showing magnified views.

Expanding spheres of star-hot gas marked the funereal pyres of four Turusch ships, while a fifth tumbled end for end through space, spilling a haze of vaporized armor, internal atmosphere, and sparkling debris in its wake. Patches of bright-glowing turbulence on the planet’s night side showed where two A7s had missed orbital targets and struck the planet instead.

So … five hits total. Not bad, considering the Kentucky windage involved from sixth tenths of an AU out. That left fifty enemy vessels to deal with … correction, fifty-three. Three others must have either been masked by the planet when America had first scanned the inner system, or had arrived in the objective hours since.

Enemy warships were scattering from the vicinity of the planet, a swarm of nest-kicked hornets. Turusch vessels were characteristically large, bulky, and clumsy-looking, the space-going equivalents of fortresses painted in bold swaths of either green and black or a starker red and black. Even their fighters, painted in green-and-black stripes, had the look of lumpy potatoes, each four to five times the mass of a Confederation Starhawk.

Despite appearances, they were fast and they were deadly. Gray caught one huge capital ship with his eyes and held it as he triggered a weapons lock. The Starhawk’s offensive warload consisted of thirty-two VG-10 Krait smart missiles, a StellarDyne Blue Lightning PBP-2 particle beam projector, and, for very close work, a Gatling RFK-90 KK cannon. At long range, smart missiles were always the weapon of choice.

A tone sounded in his ear, indicating that a VG had acquired lock.

“Omega Seven!” he called over the tacnet. “Target lock! Fox One!”

The missile streaked from beneath the embrace of Gray’s wings, the heat dump from its miniature gravitic drive gleaming like a tiny sun as it streaked through space.

The other Starhawks were all there, still in the circle formation they’d adopted out in the system’s Kuiper Belt. The circle was opening now as the fighters applied lateral thrust and spread themselves apart. Other pilots were calling Fox One now, the code-phrase that meant they were firing smart missiles. More missiles flashed into the gulf ahead, tracking and dogging enemy warships, each accelerating at close to one thousand gravities.

His missile and two others were closing with the big green-and-black enemy warship—a Tango-class destroyer, under the standard Confederation nomenclature for enemy ships. The enemy was dumping sand—blasting clouds of tiny, refractive particles into space both to defeat laser targeting systems and to serve as a physical barrier against incoming kinetic-kill or high-velocity warheads.

One missile hit the expanding sand cloud and exploded, a ten-kiloton blast that pulsed in the darkness, but the other two missiles plunged through the hole vaporized in the Turusch ship’s defensive barrier, striking its magnetic shielding and detonating like a close pair of bright, savage novae.

Enemy shield technology was a bit better than the Confederation could manage yet. Neither nuke penetrated the envelope of twisted spacetime sheathing the destroyer, but enough of the double blast leaked through to crumple a portion of the warship’s aft hull. Atmosphere spilled into space as the ship slewed to one side, staggered by the hit.

Gray was already tracking another Turusch warship, however, a more distant one, a Juliet-class cruiser accelerating hard toward the planet.

“Omega Seven!” he called. “Target lock! Fox One … and Fox One!” Two Kraits streaked into darkness.

“Incoming, everyone,” Allyn warned. “Jink and pull gee!”

The half of the sky in the direction of planet and sun was filled now with red blips, the icons marking incoming enemy missiles. Turusch anti-ship missile technology was better than human systems, and their warshots packed bigger warheads.

This, Gray thought, is where things get interesting.

Chapter Three

25 September 2404

VFA-44 Dragonfires

Eta Boötis System

1251 hours, TFT

Throughout his gravfighter training back at SupraQuito, they’d hammered away at one essential lesson of space-fighter tactics: always, when an incoming warhead reached your position, be someplace else.

Gray had been in combat twice before, at Arcturus Station against the Turusch and at Everdawn against the Chinese, and knew the truth of that statement. There was no effective way to jam incoming warheads. The missiles used by both sides were piloted by brilliant if somewhat narrow-minded AIs, using a variety of sensor systems to track and home on an enemy target. No one set of standard countermeasures could blind all of an enemy’s sensors—heat, radar, mass, gravitometric, X-ray, neutrino, optical.

Nor was it possible to outrun them. Turusch anti-fighter missiles could accelerate faster than a Starhawk, at least for short bursts. They operated on the tactical assumption that if they couldn’t kill you outright, they could chase you out of town, forcing you into a straight-run boost out of battlespace to where you no longer posed a threat.

So when enemy missiles were hunting you down, the ancient aphorism about a best defense was decidedly true. You dodged, you weaved, you accelerated … but you also struck back.

A swarm of missiles approached from ahead, brilliant red pinpoints projected by the Starhawk’s display system against the stars. Gray’s AI picked out no fewer than six enemy missiles that, judging by their vectors, were homing in on him.

“Here comes the reception committee,” Allyn announced. “Independent maneuvering.”

“Copy that, Blue Omega Leader.”

He accelerated toward the oncoming missiles, hard, then threw his Starhawk into a low-port turn, as tight as he could manage at this velocity.

Vector changes in space-fighter combat were a lot trickier than for an atmospheric fighter; they were possible at all only because gravitic propulsive systems allowed the fighter to project a deep singularity above, below, or to one side or the other relative to the craft’s current attitude. Intense, projected gravity wells whipped the fighter around onto a new vector, bleeding off velocity to throw an extra burst of power to the inertial dampers that, theoretically at least, kept the pilot from being squashed by centripetal acceleration.

Enough gravities seeped through the straining damper field to press Gray back against the yielding nanofoam of his seat; stars blurred past his head.

“Six missiles still locked on and tracking,” the AI voice of his Starhawk told him with emotionless persistence. “Time to detonation nine seconds … eight … seven …”

At “three” Gray grav-jinked left, firing passive sand canisters. The enemy missiles were now a few thousand kilometers off his starboard side, using their own gravitics to attempt to match his turn. He kept pushing, kept turning into the oncoming warheads.

Blinding light blossomed from astern and to starboard … then again … and yet again as three missiles struck sand clouds and detonated. Three down, three to go. He punched up the Starhawk’s acceleration to 3,000 gravities, turning again to race toward the planet.

As always happened for Gray in combat, a rushing sense of speed, of acceleration washed through him, matching, it seemed the acceleration of his fighter.

He might not be able to outrun Trash missiles in a flat-out race, but in most combat situations, outrunning them wasn’t necessary. Most missiles held their acceleration down to a tiny fraction of their full capability. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be able to match a low-G turn by their target, and they would wildly overshoot. So the remaining missiles on Gray’s tail were putting on just enough speed to slowly catch up with him.

“Two new missiles now locked on and tracking. Terminal intercept in twenty-four seconds.”

And that was the other half of the equation. Standard Turusch tactics were to fire whole swarms of missiles, sending them at him from all directions, until no maneuver he made could possibly jink past them all.

“Three missiles of original salvo still closing. Terminal intercept in eight seconds.”

Gray moved his hand through the control field and the Starhawk flipped end-for-end, bringing his particle accelerator to bear. The three closest missiles appeared as a triangle of red blips, the alphanumerics next to each flickering as range and time-to-impact swiftly dwindled.

His eyes held one, and a red square appeared around the blip at the triangle’s apex, signifying target lock. He moved his hand and a stream of neutrons turned the missile into an expanding cloud of plasma. He shifted his attention to a second blip, and watched it explode as well.

The third had vanished.

“Ship!” he said. “Confirm destruction of all three missiles!”

“Two anti-fighter missiles confirmed destroyed,” the AI’s voice said. “Negative confirmation on third missile. Two missiles of second salvo still locked on and closing. Terminal intercept in sixteen seconds. Third salvo fired, locked on and tracking. Terminal intercept in thirty-seven seconds… .”

That was the way it worked in modern space-fighter combat … with more missiles fired, and more, and more. Worse, from his mission’s perspective, the more time he spent trying to dodge incoming missiles, the less able he would be to carry out his primary objective, which was to close with Turusch capital ships and destroy them.

He pulled the Starhawk around until it was again traveling straight for the planet ahead.

“This is Blue Omega Seven,” he called. “Request clearance for PCO launch on this vector.”

“Omagea Seven, Omega One,” Allyn’s voice came back. “You are clear for AMSO.”

“Firing PCO in three … two … one … Fox Two!”

In space-fighter combat, Fox One signaled the launch of any of a variety of all-aspect homing missiles, including the Krait. Fox Two, on the other hand, signaled a sandcaster launch—Anti-Missile Shield Ordnance, or AMSO. An AS-78 missile streaked from beneath his cockpit, accelerating at two thousand gravities. After five seconds, it was traveling one hundred kilometers per second faster than Gray’s Starhawk and, when it detonated, the individual grains of sand—actually sand-grain-sized spherules of matter-compressed lead—were released in an expanding cloud of grains, each traveling with the same velocity and in the same general direction. Sandcaster missiles were dumb weapons as opposed to smart; protocol required requesting clearance for launch, because a grain of sand striking a friendly fighter at several thousand kilometers per second could ruin the day for two pilots, him and his unintended target.

Over the tacnet, he could hear other Omega pilots calling Fox Two as they slammed sand at the oncoming missiles.

In a few more seconds, the sand cloud had dispersed to the point where it created a physical shield several kilometers across. His initial velocity after his turn-and-burn with the enemy ship-killers had been just over twelve thousand kilometers per second; he increased his speed now by an extra hundred kps, slipping up close and tucking in behind his sand wall and drifting at the same speed.

White light blossomed ahead and to starboard, dazzling even through the stepped-down optical filters of his fighter’s sensors.

A second nuclear blast, ahead and below … this one close enough that the shell of expanding plasma jolted his ship and sent hard radiation sleeting across the Starhawk’s electromagnetic shielding.

Gray decelerated, braking hard. Eta Boötis IV was rapidly swelling to an immense crescent just ahead, as thousands of brilliant stars flickered and flashed against the planet’s dark night side—sand grains striking atmosphere at high velocity and vaporizing in an instant. By now, the defensive cloud had either dispersed to ineffectiveness or been swept aside or vaporized by repeated nuclear detonations. But he’d run the gauntlet in close to the planet, and now he was within combat range of the majority of the Turusch fleet.

The near presence of the planet complicated things, but more for the defenders than for the Blue Omega Strike Force. The planet’s bulk now blocked the line of sight to a number of the Turusch warships in low orbit, provided the gravitational mass for free course changes, and in this world’s case even added an atmosphere that could be used either as a defensive screen or for simple delta-V.

The other fighters of Blue Omega were scattered across the sky now, each operating independently of the others. Gray could hear the cockpit chatter, but had to focus on his immediate situation. His wingman … where the hell was his wing?

There she was—Blue Omega Eight, two thousand kilometers aft and to starboard. Katie Tucker was engaging a big Turusch Echo Sierra—an electronic scanner vessel. That, at least, was what Intelligence thought those monsters might be, with their far-flung antennae and hundred-meter sensor dishes.

Confederation tactical doctrine suggested that pilots work together in wings for mutual protection, but standing orders didn’t require it. One Starhawk could kill a Turusch capital ship as easily as two, and a single one of those thermonukes they were tossing around could take out a pair of gravfighters if they were too close together.

“This is Blue Seven,” he reported. “I’m going to try to get in close to the objective.”

Objective meaning the Marine perimeter in Haris, Eta Boötis IV. It took him a moment to orient himself as his AI threw up the curving lines of longitude and latitude on the image of the planet. Haris was tipped at an extreme angle, with an axial tilt of nearly 90 degrees. At this point in its year, Eta Boötis was 30 degrees off the planet’s south pole, the Marine perimeter at 22 north.

There it was … a green triangle marking the Islamic base and the Marine expeditionary force sent to protect it, just now rotating into the local dawn. Turusch ships swarmed above and around it, or poured fire down from orbit. It was what carrier pilots liked to call “a target-rich environment.”

Gray loosed another half dozen missiles, then spotted a special target. Three thousand kilometers ahead, a Turusch fighter transport lumbered just above the planet’s cloud-choked atmosphere, fighters beginning to spill from her bays.

“Blue Omega Leader, Blue Seven,” he called, bringing the nose of his Starhawk around and accelerating. “I have a Fox Tango dropping Toads. Engaging. …”

“I copy, Blue Seven. Blue Five! Blue Four! Get in there and give Blue Seven some backup!”

“Ah, copy, Blue Leader. On our way. …”

The Turusch heavy fighters code-named “Toads” by Confed Military Intelligence were big, ugly brutes thirty meters in length and half that thick. Less maneuverable than their Confederation counterparts, they could accelerate faster, and individually, could take a hell of a lot more punishment in combat. As Gray swung onto an attack vector with the transport, the Toads already released had begun boosting into intercept courses.

“Fox One!” Gray shouted over the net as he released a Krait. “And Fox One … Fox One … Fox One!”

The red-and-black Toad transport was a prime target, easily worth the expenditure of four nuke-tipped Kraits. Confederation fighter pilots steadfastly refused to refer to Fox Tango transports as “carriers.” They insisted that the code name Fox Tango, in fact, was short for “Fat Target” rather than the more prosaic “Fighter Transport.”

Missiles released, Gray snapped out an artificial singularity to port and rolled left, breaking off the run. The enormous transport was throwing up a cloud of defensive fire—sand, gatling KKs, particle beams, and point-defense HELs.

The Toads already released by the transport were falling into echelon formation as they accelerated toward Gray’s fighter. There were five of them, and they were already so close they were beginning to loose missiles at him.

He plunged for atmosphere.

By now he’d bled off most of his velocity, and was dropping toward the planet’s night side at a relatively sedate eight hundred kilometers per second. Using full reverse thrust, he slowed still further as his Starhawk’s crescent shape flattened and elongated somewhat for atmospheric entry, growing aft stabilizers and a refractory keel. He was moving at nearly thirty kilometers per second, eight kps faster than the planet’s escape velocity.

He felt the shudder as his craft sliced through thin atmosphere, and used the aft singularity to slow him further still.

“Alert.” The ship’s computer voice somehow managed to convey the illusion of sharp emotion. “Shielded anti-ship missile closing from one-eight-zero, azimuth plus zero five! Impact in six … five …”

The lost missile, coming in from dead astern. There was no time for maneuvering, and no way to outrun the thing with the bulk of Eta Boötis dead ahead. Gray flipped the fighter end-for-end, searching for the telltale red star of the incoming warhead.

There! Twenty kilometers! Lock … and fire…

The warhead detonated in the same instant that he gave the fire command.

Seconds passed before Gray blinked back to full awareness. Motion-streaked stars alternated with blackness spinning past his field of view. “AI!” he cried out. “Situation!”

There was no immediate response. Possibly, events had momentarily overloaded it. He didn’t need a ship AI to tell him the situation was bad. He was in a tumble, power and drives were out, and he was falling through thin air toward Eta Boötis’s night side at an unknown but fairly high velocity.

Very soon, the Eta Boötean atmosphere would be getting thick enough that the friction would incinerate him.

He was still getting sensor feeds, but life support and other ship’s systems were out. IC was down, com was down, attitude control was down.

The SG-92 Starhawk had a robust and highly intelligent SRS, or self-repair system. Advanced nanotech modules allowed broken or burnt-out systems to literally regrow themselves, dissolving into the ship’s hull matrix, then reassembling. When he checked the details on the dead life-support system, it told him it was 75 percent repaired, and that number jumped to 80 as he watched it. Power and control systems, too, were moments from being back on-line.

He directed the system to give priority to power and flight control; there was enough air in his personal life support to last for quite a while, and the temperature inside the cockpit was not uncomfortable yet.

The operative word being yet. The external temperature was at five hundred Celsius, and rising quickly.

“Blue Omega Flight, this is Blue Seven,” he called, not with any real hope of establishing contact. Communications, according to his IHD, were also down, though there was always the possibility that it was his display or even the ship’s AI that was faulty rather than his lasercom. There was a set list of things to try in the event of catastrophic multiple-system failure, and attempting to reach the other members of the flight was high among the priorities.

As he expected, however, there was no response. He directed the repair systems to lower the priority of the com network in order to focus more of the available power to power and control.

Abruptly, the dizzying alternation of star streaks with planet night halted, the shock of acceleration jolting him hard. He had partial attitude control now, though the main gravs were still out and only a trickle of power was coming through from the zero-point modules. The fighter shuddered as the keel cut thickening atmosphere, shedding more and more velocity.

He searched the sky display for more missiles, but saw none. That didn’t mean they weren’t out there, closing on him. The warhead that had just blasted him into an uncontrolled planetary descent had been shielded and smart, using the sensor-blinding flash of a nuclear detonation to drop to a velocity just faster than the Starhawk without being seen. It had stalked him then, for long seconds, reappearing on his displays only when it began punching through atmosphere, growing hot and leaving a visible contrail.

Turusch anti-fighter missiles, it seemed, were getting smarter and smarter.

But he was deep in the planet’s atmosphere now, and if AFMs were tracking him in, he should be able to spot their ionization contrails. He decided to focus all of his attention on his fighter, and on surviving the next few minutes.

He was close to the dawn terminator, 180 kilometers above the night-black surface of Eta Boötis IV. Daylight was a sharp-edged, red-orange sliver along the curve of the planet, with the intolerably brilliant orange dome of Eta Boötis just beginning to nudge above the horizon. The cloud tops far beneath the Starhawk’s keel were glowing a sullen red, casting long shadows across the deeper cloud decks.

And then the ionization cloud enveloped the Starhawk with the roaring intensity of a blast furnace. The fighter shuddered and bucked as Gray took the manual controls, trying to keep the nose high and spreading the keel to better disperse the heat. He wondered how many Turusch ships might be targeting him right now on his heat signature alone … then decided that since there was nothing he could do about it, there was no sense in worrying. Plenty of debris, from anti-missile sand grains to the shattered hulks of Turusch warships, were falling across the night face of the planet, and his Starhawk was just one more chunk in the debris field.

With manual control restored, he could hold the Starhawk in an entry glide and adjust its attitude, but the gravs were still out, meaning he was falling like a somewhat aerodynamic brick. In any case, primary gravitics were worse than useless in a planetary atmosphere. A 50,000-G singularity would gulp down molecules of air so quickly it would become star-hot in the process, overload, and explode like a tiny supernova. There were weapons—so-called gravitic cannon—that used the effect, and no fighter pilot wanted one of those detonating right off the nose of his ship.

What he did have were his secondary gravitics, drive units built into the structure of his spacecraft that could generate about ten to twelve gravities, and which allowed the Starhawk to hover. Carefully, Gray began feeding power to his secondaries, adding their drag to the already considerable drag of the atmosphere to further slow his descent.

His power tap, fortunately, was feeding him enough power to drive the secondaries at full pull. Without that, he would have been thoroughly and completely screwed. He brought the nose of his ship higher, rotated his acceleration couch into the optimal position, then engaged the secondaries. Without his ICs, his inertial compensators, the shock slammed him down and back against his seat and would have broken bones had the deceleration not scaled up smoothly, if swiftly, from zero-G to ten. He felt the uncomfortable jab of medfeeds pressed against his neck beneath the angle of his jaw, at his back, and in his groin as they monitored and adjusted his blood pressure, keeping him from blacking out. Even so, his vision narrowed alarmingly, as though he were seeing his surroundings through a black tunnel. His IHD, painting images and words against his visual field, winked out momentarily, replaced by white static. For an age, it seemed, he lay there beneath a crushing weight, scarcely able to breathe, blind and deaf as the Starhawk shuddered and thumped and shook around him.

Then, like a drowning man reaching the surface and gulping down fresh air, Gray struggled from the dark and the smothering pressure. The fireball surrounding him dissipated, and he emerged into open air.

And his flight systems were coming back on-line. He had half power now, more than enough for anything short of generating a fifty-K boost. Weapons were on-line, full sensory input, IC, AI, it was all there. Relief burst through him like the golden morning light on the horizon ahead. Voices crackled and called over his audio circuit, the other members of his squadron.

“Blue Ten! Blue Ten! I have Tango fighters inbound at five-zero, Azimuth minus four-one! …”

“Copy, Ten! Breaking right-high!”

“Here’s the merge! I’m on him, Snorky!”

“Fox One! Fox One!” Static flared and crackled, and, with it, a brilliant flash from somewhere above and astern. “Jesus! Did you see that? …”

“Flame one Bravo-Bravo!”

“Blue Omega Leader, this is Blue Seven,” Gray called. “Do you copy?”

“Copy, Seven!” The voice was tight and unemotional—probably Allyn’s AI avatar rather than the squadron CO herself.

“I got toasted a bit and chewed air down to the deck. Systems are back on-line now, at eighty percent. Moving toward the Mike perimeter.”

“We copy that, Blue Seven.” That was the real Commander Allyn’s voice. “Excellent job, Prim. Get in and offer the Marines whatever help they need, channel four-niner-three Zulu. The rest of us will be in there as soon as we can work through.”

Gray felt wildly contrasting emotions, a sharp thrill of pleasure at the atta-boy from his CO, and anger at her use of his detested ready-room handle.

“Rog that,” he replied. He dipped his gravfighter’s nose and accelerated.

He wasn’t quite “down to the deck,” as he’d reported, but close enough. The Starhawk was dropping now past the twenty-kilometer mark. The sky above was still space-dark, the brightest stars—Arcturus, especially—still gleaming and brilliant, but the cloud decks below rose thick and towering, their tops sculpted by high-altitude winds and tinted red and gold by the rising sun. He’d crossed enough of the planet’s face that the local sun was well above the horizon now, casting long, blue-purple shadows and hazy shafts of golden light across the distinctly three-dimensional surface of the cloudscape below.

Gray adjusted his ship’s hull-form again, sculpting it for high-speed aerial flight, absorbing the deep entry keel and extending the wings farther and deeper into their forward-canted configuration. Behind him, a sudden burst of shooting stars marked another cloud of sand or debris entering atmosphere, a barrage of silent flick-flick-flicks of light.

He let his AI target on the Marine beacon, bringing the SG-92’s prow left across the horizon, then dipping down into a plunging dive. He opened his com suite to the Marine frequency and began sending out an approach vector clearance request.

He hadn’t crossed seventy-one AUs and survived a near-miss by a thermonuke to get shot down by the damned jarheads.

MEF HQ

Mike-Red Perimeter

Eta Boötis System

1259 hours, TFT

Major General Eunan Charles Gorman looked up as another incoming gravitic round struck the perimeter shields with piercing thunder. The deck of the headquarters dome rocked with the impact, and both lights and display monitors dimmed and flickered as the screens strained to dissipate the surge of energy grounding out of the sky. It wouldn’t be long before the screens overloaded; when that happened, the defense of Mike-Red would come to an abrupt and pyrotechnic end.

The large three-view in the center of the HQ dome currently showed the Marine beachhead—a slender oval five kilometers long and perhaps two wide, sheltered beneath the shimmering hemisphere of an energy shield array six kilometers across. They were well-situated on high, rocky ground, but the terrain offered few advantages at the moment. The enemy was attempting to burn them out, pounding at the shield with nukes and heavy artillery, some fired from space, some fired from emplacements surrounding the beachhead and as far as a hundred kilometers away. All of the ground immediately around the Marine position was charred and lifeless, the sand fused into black, steaming glass. Incoming fire was so heavy the Marines could not lower the screen even for the instant required for a counter-battery reply.

That was the worst of it—having to sit here day after day taking this hammering, unable to shoot back.

“General!” one of the technicians at a sensor console nearby called out. “We have friendlies inbound!”

“Eh? How far? How long?”

“Two thousand kilometers,” the tech replied. “At eleven kps, they should be at the perimeter within about three minutes.”

“Thank God. It’s about time.”

Another gravitic round struck, the thunder echoing through the protective shield with a hollow, rumbling boom. A thermonuke struck an instant later, white light enveloping the base, hard, harsh, and glaring.

General Gorman looked at the small man in civilian dress standing beside him. “Well, Jamel. We may have help in time after all.”

Jamel Saeed Hamid gave Gorman a sour look. “Too little, too late, I fear. We have lost the planet, either way.”

“Maybe. But we’ll have our lives.”

The Marines on Haris had become aware of the arrival of the Confederation fleet only nineteen minutes earlier, when a tightly beamed X-ray lasercom burst transmission had reached the planet. Minutes later, high-energy detonations in planetary orbit had marked the beginnings of a long-range fighter strike, first as sand clouds and dust balls had swept through local space at near-c, then as SG-92 fighters had entered the battlespace and begun engaging Turusch fleet units.

The arrival was welcome, certainly, but what the Marines on the ground needed more than a fleet action right now was close support, fighters scraping off their bellies on the Haris swamp growth and putting force packages down on Marine-designated targets around the perimeter.

“Bradley!” he snapped, naming his Combat Information officer. “Punch up a list of targets for the flyboys. Priority on grav cannon, nukes, and heavy PC emplacements.”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

Gorman was a Marine, and he would have preferred Marine aviators out there … but right now he would take any help he could get, even damned Navy zorchies. If they could take just a little of the pressure off, there was some hope that the Navy transports would make it through, and they could begin the evacuation.

How many transports were there? Enough for everyone in his fast-attenuating command? And the Mufrids too?

Don’t even think about that now. …

“Looks like a general engagement in local battlespace, sir,” Bradley added. The colonel was standing behind two scanner techs, watching a glowing sphere representing nearby space, highlighting planetary schematics and the slow-drifting red and green blips of spacecraft, Turusch and human.

“Who’s winning?” Gorman asked.

“Hard to say, sir. The Navy boys hit ’em pretty hard with that first pass, but they’re starting to lose people now. Two … maybe three fighters have been knocked out.”

“Understood.”

A handful of gravfighters had no chance at all against a major Turusch battle fleet. The hope was that they would be able to maul that fleet badly enough that the capital ships could take them out when they arrived in another nine or ten hours. Better yet, if the fighters hurt the Tushies badly enough, they might withdraw before the Confederation fleet arrived.

Gorman had been in combat often enough to know that you never counted on things breaking your way like that. If the bad guys cut and run, fantastic.

But the Marines would plan for something less optimistic. They had to.

Their survival depended on it.

Chapter Four

25 September 2404

Blue Omega Seven

Approaching Mike-Red

Eta Boötis System

1301 hours, TFT

Trevor Gray held his gravfighter snug against the deck, streaking across open water a scant twenty meters up. His velocity now down to eight kps, he was still throwing out a hypersonic shock wave that dragged across the surface of the shallow sea, sending up a vast, white wall of spray stretching out in a knife-straight line for over a hundred kilometers behind him.

The Marine perimeter was five hundred kilometers ahead.

He’d dropped down through the clouds and hugged the deck to avoid Turusch tracking systems, though it was likely they could still see him from orbit. Nothing was dropping on him out of the sky at the moment, however, so just maybe he’d slipped in unnoticed.

The surface was gloomy after the brilliant sunlight above the cloud deck. Haris—Eta Boötis IV—was shrouded in thick clouds, a solid blanket tinted red, orange, and yellow by various sulfur compounds in the atmosphere, and those colors were echoed by the oily sea below. The surface temperature was hot—hotter than the world’s distance from its sun would suggest. The cloud deck and airborne sulfur compounds created a greenhouse effect that substantially warmed the planet—not nearly to the extent of Venus back in the Sol system, perhaps, but hot enough to render the place less than desirable as real estate, even if humans could breathe the air. What the hell had the Mufrids seen in the place, anyway?

The temperature outside his hurtling Starhawk, he noted, was 48 degrees Celsius—a swelteringly hot day in the tropics back on Earth, and it was only a short time past local dawn.

Targeting data flowed through his IHD, appearing in windows opening against the periphery of his visual field. God … the Marines had listed hundreds of targets out there, far too many for one lone gravfighter.

But he began dragging down targets with his eyes and locking on. He heard the tone indicating a solid lock. “Mike-Red, Blue Omega Seven. I have tone on the first six targets on your list. Request firing clearance.”

“Blue Seven, hell yeah! Slam the bastards!”

“Copy. Engaging.” He lifted his fighter slightly higher above the water, up to eighty meters, to give himself launch clearance. “Fox Three!”

Six Krait missiles dropped clear of the Starhawk’s keel, emerging from exit ports melting open around them in the hull, then accelerated. Fox Three was the firing code for targets on the ground, or for extremely large ships or bases in orbit. Once, centuries before in the skies above Earth’s oceans, Fox One had designated the launch of a short-range heat seeker; Fox Two, a radar-guided missile; and Fox Three, a particular type of long-range missile called a Phoenix. The terminology had remained the same, though the meanings were different now, applied to much different technologies.

Guided by their onboard AIs, the six Kraits streaked ahead of the Starhawk, their grav drives glowing brilliantly as they plowed through the dense atmosphere. Gray banked left and accelerated slightly; Turusch sensors in orbit would have spotted that launch even if they’d missed his fighter, and they would be trying to target him now.

A blue-white detonation flared at his back, searing a tunnel down through the atmosphere and vaporizing a stadium-sized chunk of seawater. A second blast ignited the sky to his right. He was traveling too fast for the shock waves to catch him, but he cut right and slowed, riding the fast-expanding wave front of the second explosion in order to take advantage of the mushroom cap of superheated steam overhead. Those shots had been from a Turusch orbital particle cannon; each shot ionized air molecules and tended to momentarily block sensors trying to read through the muck.

It might mask him for a precious couple of seconds more.

“Target fifteen on the Red-Mike targeting list ahead, coming into range,” his AI announced. His IHD showed the target as a red triangle on the horizon—some kind of Turusch gun emplacement or surface battery. It was already too close for a Krait lock-on; he switched to his PBP, his particle beam projector, or “pee-beep,” as it was more popularly known.

At his AI’s command, the nose of his fighter melted away half a meter, exposing the projector head. “Fire!”

A beam of blue-white light stabbed ahead of his gravfighter, intolerably brilliant; a high-energy UV laser burned a vacuum tunnel through the air, followed a microsecond later by the proton beam, directed and focused by a powerful magnetic field. Twenty-some kilometers ahead, a surface crawler, a squat and massive floater nearly one hundred meters long, was struck by a devastating bolt of lightning before it could fire its next gravitic shell. Secondary explosions lit up the sky, visible from the Starhawk’s cockpit as Gray broke hard to the left.

His AI began loosing Krait missiles, each locking onto a different target on the Marine list. More energy beams and high-velocity kinetic-kill slugs slammed into the sea a few kilometers astern. Gray increased his speed and began jinking, pulling irregular turns left and right to make it harder on the Turusch gunners some hundreds of kilometers above him. At a thought, a half dozen decoys snapped clear of the Starhawk and streaked in various directions, trailing electronic signatures like an SG-92.

The burnt-orange and deep-red sea a hundred meters beneath him lightened suddenly to pale yellow-orange as he crossed over shallow water, then gave way to land—bare rock and a rolling carpet of orange. Gray was moving too low and too fast to see details, moving too fast to see anything beyond a vague brown-and-orange blur.

A map display in his IHD showed blossoming white flashes in a ragged circle around the Marine position. His Kraits were slamming home in rapid succession now, loosing thermonuclear fury across the alien landscape. Turning sharply, the G-forces negated by his inertial compensators, he angled across a narrow arm of the sea toward the Marine position. His missiles were expended now, the last of them flashing off toward the gloom of the west.

“Red-Mike, this is Blue Omega Seven. I’m Echo-Whiskey and coming in toward the perimeter.”

“Copy, Blue Seven,” a Marine voice said. “We’re getting drone evals on the eggs you laid. Good shooting. Looks like you tore the bastards up pretty good. Nice shooting!”

“Almost up to Marine standards,” Gray quipped.

“I didn’t say you were that good, Navy. …”

The Turusch particle beam stabbed down out of the cloud deck, a violet-and-blue bolt meters across, scarcely ten meters off Gray’s starboard wing. Static shrieked from the electronic interference and blanked out the displays in Gray’s head. The shock wave caught him from the side, tumbling him over wildly. His AI intervened with reflexes far faster than a human’s, engaging full thrust and pulling up hard before the blast could slam him into the sea.

Then his power system shut down, and with it his weapons, his primary flight controls, and his life support. He had just enough juice in reserve to put full thrust into his secondaries before they, too, failed and he began dropping toward the alien sea. Slowed now, to less than a kilometer per second, he tried to pull his nose up for a wet landing, but then everything went dead, leaving him in darkness.

“Eject, eject, eject!” his AI was shouting in his ear before its voice, too, failed. The Starhawk’s ejection system was self-contained and separate from other ship systems. He grabbed the D-ring handle on the deck, twisted it to arm the mechanism, and pulled.

The cockpit melted away around him, the nanoflow so quick it was more like an explosion than an opening, the blast of wind shrieking around his helmet. Rocket motors in the base of his couch fired, kicking him clear of the falling spacecraft seconds before it slammed into the surging red waters of the sea.

With his inertial compensators out, the jolt of acceleration rattled his bones and brought with it a stab of terror. Despite both his flight training and numerous experiential downloads, Gray didn’t share the seamless relationship with technology enjoyed by the others in his squadron. He couldn’t. For a long moment as the couch carried him in stomach-wrenching free fall, panic clawed at the back of his mind, and he struggled to control it.

The eject sequence, fortunately, was entirely automated, a precaution in case the pilot was crippled or unconscious. Scant meters above the surface of the sea, braking rockets fired with another jolt, slowing him suddenly, and then Gray splashed down in the shallow, oily water.

Smoke boiled from the sea a kilometer or two away as his Starhawk dissolved, its nano components turning suicidal and melting the rest of the ship so that it wouldn’t fall into Turusch hands … or whatever they had that passed for hands. Gray wasn’t sure. Overhead, orange-red clouds roiled and twisted, dragged along by high winds a few kilometers up.

He struggled to free himself from the chair’s embrace. He felt heavy, dragged down by the planet’s gravity. The water, he was surprised to note, was only about a meter deep. He’d come down perhaps a kilometer from the shoreline—he could see an orange-cloaked land mass toward local north—but the seabed here was extremely shallow—a tidal flat, perhaps. Eta Boötis IV had no moon, but the large sun exerted tidal forces enough, he knew, to raise substantial tides.

Gray tried standing up, leaning against the chair, and nearly fell again. The artificial spin gravity on board the carrier America was kept at around half a G—a reasonable compromise for crew members from Earth and those born and raised on Luna, Mars, or Ganymede. The surface gravity on Eta Boötis IV was 1.85 G, almost four times what he was used to. Another low swell passed, hitting him waist-high, and he did fall; the water was heavy, with a lot of momentum behind it. He landed on his hands and knees, struggling against the planet’s dragging pull.

His e-suit would keep him alive for days. Skin-tight, pressure sealed, and with a plastic helmet almost invisible in its clarity at optical wavelengths, it was colored bright orange to help rescue craft spot him, though on this red-orange world, they would have to rely on other wavelengths to see him. A nanobreather pack was attached to his right hip, with its small bottle of oxygen beneath. The unit would recycle oxygen from CO₂ for days, and in an atmosphere, even a toxic one like this one, could pull oxygen and other gasses from the compounds outside, extending the unit’s life, and his, indefinitely.

None of that was likely to help, though, if he couldn’t reach friendly forces. He’d been shot down several hundred kilometers south of the Marine base—exactly how far, he wasn’t sure. Using his radio might well call down the Turusch equivalent of fire from heaven, so he wasn’t anxious to try that. His couch should have sent out a marker code when it touched down, a burst transmission, meaningless—he hoped—to the enemy, but indicating a successful ejection and landing.

The question, however, was whether to stay with the couch or try to reach the marine perimeter. Red-Mike was a long hike, but, on the other hand, he was nakedly exposed here on this tidal flat, and there would be clouds of Turusch drones moving through the area very soon, looking for him. And the drones would bring larger, more dangerous visitors.

Better, he decided, to be moving. He could work his way closer to the Marine perimeter, and give friendly forces a better chance of picking him up. If they could find him …

He didn’t think about how slender those chances might be. Hell, the Marines probably assumed he’d been shot down and killed, and couldn’t leave the safety of their protective screens in any case. His squadron was heavily engaged far above. They would be free to initiate a search only if the Turusch fleet left the area, and the Tushies weren’t about to do that if all they were facing was a handful of gravfighters.

The biggest problem, however, was moving. Gray couldn’t walk in Eta Boötis’s gravity, not for very far, at any rate. He would need some help.

The back of the couch opened up to reveal a compact emergency locker. Inside were extra bottles of oxygen for long-term excursions in hard vacuum, an M-64 laser carbine, medical and emergency survival packs, and a spider.

The spider was the size of a flattened football, with four legs folded up tight. When he activated the unit, the legs began unfolding, each extending for over a meter from the central body. Immediately, the unit moved behind him, put the tips of two legs on his shoulders to steady him, then began to snuggle in close, the main unit snuggling up against his spine, each leg adjusting and reconfiguring to conform exactly to his body. In seconds, it had adhered to his e-suit, clamped tight at ankles, knees, and hips. There was a vibrating whine of servos, and the unit straightened up, pulling him upright.

He stood now in knee-deep water, supported by the exoskeletal unit, or ESU, and when another heavy wave surged slowly past, it adjusted with his movement, shifted with his weight, and kept him upright. He took a sloshing, heavy step forward, then another. He still felt like he weighed 150 kilos—he did, after all—but he could stand without feeling like his knees were about to buckle, and the spider on his back fed his servos power enough to help counteract the drag of gravity. The extensions secured to his arms were flexible and slack at the moment; if he tried to lift something, however, they would match his movements and contribute with support and lift of their own. Wearing one of these rigs, a person could do anything he could do in his normal gravity field, including running, jumping, and lifting heavy objects. The word was that with practice he could run a Marathon and not get winded. They were standard issue to civilian tourists to Earth from low-G worlds like Mars.

Med kit and survival gear snapped to clamps on the spider, and the carbine slung over his right shoulder. He wouldn’t need the O₂. There was plenty of oxygen in the atmosphere, bound up with carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, carbonyl sulfide, and a witch’s brew of other gasses, and his suit would have no trouble processing it to keep him alive almost indefinitely. The little unit would handle his food and water requirements as well, so long as he fed it CHON—shorthand for carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. He needed to add an occasional handful of dirt or organic matter to provide trace elements like phosphorus and iron, necessary for the nanufacture of certain vitamins and amino acids.

There was no emergency survival radio in his survival kit, because, in fact, his e-suit had radio circuitry built into it, both for communication and for tracking. He needed line-of-sight to reach the Marine base directly, but his squadron and a large number of battlespace drones would be above the horizon now, somewhere above those blood-hued, low-hanging clouds.

A direct call to them, however, might generate way too much interest on the part of the Turusch, who would be closely monitoring the electronic environment around the planet, and a stray, coded signal might bring down anything from a KK projectile to a 100-megaton nuke.

His personal e-hancements, computer circuitry nanotechnically grown into the sulci of his brain, had downloaded both the ghost-shadow of his fighter’s AI and the position of the Marine base in those last seconds before he’d crashed. As he turned his head, his IHD hardware threw a green triangle up against his visual field, marking a spot on the horizon … in that direction, toward the beach.

That was where he had to go, then. Taking a last look around, he started wading toward the shore.

CIC, TC/USNA CVS America

35.4 AUs from Eta Boötis

1330 hours, TFT

Admiral Koenig checked the time once again. The fleet had been traveling for 9.4 hours, accelerating constantly at 500 gravities. They were nearing the midpoint now, halfway between the Kuiper Belt space where they’d arrived in-system and their destination. Their speed at the moment was .77 c, fast enough that for every three minutes passing in the universe outside, only two minutes passed within the America.

It had been an uneventful passage so far, thank God. He was all too aware, however, that by now the gravfighters of VF-44 had reached the planet and were engaging the Turusch fleet.

He checked the time again. The Dragonfires had been mixing it up with the bad guys for forty-five minutes already, an eternity in combat. It was entirely possible that the fighting was over.

If so, twelve brave men and women were dead now—dead, or trapped in crumpled hulks on high-speed, straight-line vectors out of battlespace.

Best not to think about that. …

“Admiral?” the voice of Commander Katryn Craig, the CIC Operations officer, said in Koenig’s head. “Mr. Quintanilla is requesting permission to enter the CIC.”

Koenig sighed. He would rather have given orders that the civilian be kept off the command deck entirely, but he was under orders from Fleet Mars to cooperate with the jackass, and playing the martinet would not smooth the bureaucratic pathway in the least.

Politics. He made a sour face. Sometimes, it seemed as though his job was nothing else but.

“Let him in,” Koenig said, grudgingly.

Quintanilla entered from the aft passageway a moment later. “Admiral? I was wondering if you could give me an update.”

“We’re roughly halfway there,” Koenig told him. “Nine hours and some to go.”

Quintanilla pulled his way to the display projection at the center of CIC. There, small globes of light glowed in holographic projection, showing the positions of both Eta Boötis A and B, fourteen major planets, the task force’s current position just outside the orbit of one of the system’s gas giants, and a red haze around the objective. The carrier task force had no way of receiving telemetry from the fighters it had launched nine and a half hours earlier, of course, not while its ships were encased in their Alcubierre bubbles, but if everything had proceeded according to the oplan, the Dragonfires should have reached the vicinity of Eta Boötis IV some forty-five minutes earlier.

“Does that mean we’re going to do a skew-flip, Admiral? To start decelerating?”

“No, sir, it does not. You’re thinking of the gravitic drives on the fighters. The Alcubierre Drive works differently … an entirely different principle.”

“I don’t understand.”

Koenig wondered if that man had been briefed at all … or if he’d been given a technical download that he’d failed to review.

Quintanilla seemed to read Koenig’s expression. “Look, I’m here as a political liaison, Admiral. The technology of your space drive is hardly my area of expertise.”

Obviously, Koenig thought. “The type of gravitational acceleration we use on the fighters won’t work on capital ships,” he said, “vessels over about eighty meters in length. With ships as large as the America, projecting an artificial singularity pulling fifty-kay gravs or so ahead of the vessel would cause problems—tidal effects would set up deadly shear forces within the ship’s hull that would tear her to bits.

“So for larger ships, we use the Alcubierre Drive. It manipulates the fabric of spacetime both forward and astern, essentially causing space to contract ahead and expand behind. The result is an enclosed bubble of spacetime with the ship imbedded inside. The ship is not accelerating relative to the space around it, but that space is sliding across the spacetime matrix at accelerations that can reach the speed of light, or better.”

“That makes no sense whatsoever.”

Koenig grinned. “Welcome to the wonderful world of zero-point field manipulation. It’s all pretty contra-intuitive. Free energy out of hard vacuum, artificial singularities, and we can reshape spacetime itself to suit ourselves. No wonder the Sh’daar are nervous about our technology curve.”

“Explain something to me, Admiral?” Quintanilla asked. He was floating near the system display, and had been studying it for several moments.

“If I can.”

“Why only one squadron? That’s … what? Twelve spacecraft? But you have six squadrons on board, right?”

Koenig blinked, surprised by the abrupt change of topic. He’d been expecting another physics question.

“Six strike fighter squadrons, yes,” Koenig replied, cautious. What was the civilian hammering at? “Plus one reconnaissance squadron, the Sneaky Peaks; an EW squadron; two SAR squadrons; and two utility/logistics squadrons.” EW was electronic warfare, specialists in long-range electronic intelligence, or ELINT, and in battlespace command and control. SAR was search and rescue, the tugs that went out after high-velocity hulks, attempting to recover the pilots.

“But you just sent one fighter squadron in, and they have, what? Another nine hours in there before we arrive?”

“Nine hours, twenty-one minutes,” Koenig said, checking his IHD time readout.

“So what are the chances for one lone squadron against … what? Fifty-five Turusch ships, you said?”

“More than that, Mr. Quintanilla. Fifty-five was just the number we could see from seventy AUs out. And even more might have arrived since.”

Quintanilla shrugged, the movement giving him a slight rotation in microgravity. He reached out awkwardly and grabbed the back of Koenig’s seat. “Okay, twelve fighters against over fifty-five capital ships, then. It seems … suicidal.”

“I agree.”

“Then why—”

“Every man and woman of VF-44 volunteered for this op,” Koenig told him. He could have added that Koenig’s own contribution to the plan hashed out by Ops had called for three squadrons, half of America’s strike-fighter compliment. Ultimately, that had been rejected by the Fleet Operations Review Board at Mars Synchorbital. His was still the final responsibility.

“It just seems to me that your plan should have allowed for more fighters in the initial strike.”

“It’s a little late to start second-guessing the oplan working group’s decisions now, isn’t it?”

“But you could launch the rest of your strike squadrons now, couldn’t you? We’re a lot closer to the target. It would take them—”

“No, Mr. Quintanilla. We could not.”

“Why not?”

Koenig sighed. Would it serve any purpose whatsoever to educate this … civilian? “I just told you how the Alcubierre Drive works, Mr. Quintanilla.”

“Eh? What does that have to do with it?”

“As I said, each ship in the fleet is imbedded inside a bubble of warped spacetime, contracting the space ahead, expanding behind. The bubble is moving. Right now America’s bubble is moving at about three quarters of the speed of light. But each ship in the task force is imbedded within the spacetime inside its bubble and is relatively motionless compared to its surroundings.”

“So? Why can’t you just drop out of this bubble and launch more fighters?”

“Because we would drop back into normal space with the velocity we had when we engaged the Alcubierre Drive, out in this system’s Kuiper Belt, something less than one kilometer per second. We would then have to begin accelerating all over again. If we started decelerating at the halfway point, our total trip would take twenty-five and a half hours. If we keep accelerating, we’ll reach Haris in a total of eighteen and some hours. At that point we’ll be zorching along at one-point-oh-eight c, just a hair faster than light, but we’ll cut the Alcubierre Drive and drop into normal space at a modest one kps.”

“I just hope when we do, we’ll find those fighter pilots alive.”

“War means death, Mr. Quintanilla, the deaths of brave men and women doing their duty. I don’t like it any more than you do, and if I could wave my hand and change the laws of physics, I would.”

“But another nine and a half hours …”

“Let my people do their jobs, Mr. Quintanilla. There’s nothing you can do to change things, one way or the other.”

Quintanilla thought about this a moment, then swam for the CIC exit.

The hell of it was, however, that Quintanilla was right about one thing. The oplan should have called for more fighters in the first strike. The mission planners on Mars, however, had feared the consequences if America didn’t have a sufficient defensive capability once she started mixing it up with the Turusch.

Had it been up to Koenig, he would have launched all six fighter squadrons from the Eta Boötis Kuiper Belt, and trusted the destroyer screen to keep the carrier safe.

But, as he’d told the damned civilian, it was too late for second-guessing the mission plan now.

Blue Omega One

VFA-44 Dragonfires

Eta Boötis System

1335 hours, TFT

A nuclear fireball blossomed a hundred kilometers ahead, and Commander Marissa Allyn twisted her gravfighter hard into a tight yaw. A trio of Turusch fighters flashed past her starboard side, bow to stern, particle beams stabbing at her Starhawk. She sent three Kraits after them, then followed that up with the last two Kraits in her armament racks, locking on to an immense Turusch battlespace monitor just emerging from behind the planet.

The sky around her was filled with fire and destruction, with twisting fighters, lumbering capital-ship giants, and tumbling chunks of wreckage. “Mayday! Mayday!” sounded over her com link. “This is Blue Eleven … two golf-mikes on my tail …”

“Blue Eleven! Blue Three! I’m on them! …”

Golf-mikes—gravitic missiles—were looping through battlespace, their sensors locking on to any powered target not transmitting a Turusch IFF code. The damned things were next to impossible to shake, and there were so many of them in the battle now that the Confederation pilots were having to concentrate on evading them more and more.

“This is Blue Eleven! Breaking right! Breaking—”

The voice cut off with a raw burst of static. The icon representing Oz Tombaugh, Blue Eleven, on Allyn’s tactical display flared and winked out.

Damn …

“Omega Strike, this is Blue Omega One!” she called. The squadron’s expendables were almost gone, and there was little more serious damage they could do to the Turusch fleet with what was left. “Let’s get down on the deck! Make for the planet and home on Mike-Red!”

Eight members of the squadron remained in action, including Allyn.

And they still had more than nine hours to go before the relief forces arrived.

Chapter Five

25 September 2404

Blue Omega Seven

Eta Boötis IV

1353 hours, TFT

Trevor Gray slogged across wet, marshy ground, a soft and yielding surface smothered in a vibrantly red-orange tangle of vegetation. It was raining now, with big, heavy drops splattering across the ground cover, which appeared to be stretching and expanding under the pounding.

He’d heard and felt a savage boom behind him some minutes before—probably the Tushies dropping something nasty on the wreckage of his fighter or the abandoned acceleration couch, so he kept moving, trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and a possible area of Turusch interest. Moments before, he’d waded out of the shallow water, stumbling ashore on a beach covered by what looked like stubby, blunt-ended tentacles.

The thickness of the vegetation around him was surprising, though it had taken him a moment to realize that it was vegetation. In fact, he still wasn’t sure. The stuff was moving. Each tentacle was perhaps ten to fifteen centimeters long and as thick as his wrist; the tips were open, the weaving shapes hollow, and they appeared to be filled with small holes, like sponges. Though overall they were orange in color, each, in fact, shaded from deep red at the base to bright yellow at the rim of the opening. Their movements were slow and rhythmic, ripples spreading out from his feet with each step and traveling eight or ten meters in all directions, and quivering in response to the rain. He would have assumed they were animals, except for the fact that they were firmly rooted in the soft ground.

According to the readout from the circuitry woven into his e-suit, the atmosphere was a poisonous mix of carbon dioxide and gaseous sulfur compounds, with smaller amounts of ammonia, nitrogen, methane, and just a whiff of oxygen. The sea he’d just emerged from was water, but with a high percentage of sulfuric acid; the rain, he noted, was almost pure sulfuric acid—H₂SO₄—and it steamed as it splashed across the vegetation. The external temperature was up to 53 degrees Celsius, and climbing rapidly as the local morning grew more advanced.

Gray’s e-suit was composed of a finely woven carbon composite that, in theory, at least, would resist anything the local atmosphere could throw at him, including strong acids and high temperatures. He wondered, though, if any material substance could stand up to this kind of acidity for very long. There were, he noticed, quite a few rock outcroppings thrusting above the orange vegetation, all of them soft and rounded, as though smoothed by geological ages of acid rain. Some of the larger outcrops had holes eaten clear through them, and they stood above the quivering orange ground like alien gateways.

Gray’s internal circuitry had memory enough for some backup data, but had nowhere near the capacity of his wrecked fighter. There was nothing there, for instance, on the flora and fauna of Eta Boötis IV … and he wished now that he’d paid more attention when he’d been scanning through the data files on board the Starhawk.

What the hell was a chemoorganoheterotroph, anyway?

A ripple of motion caught his attention out of the corner of his eye, something dark, quick, and low to the ground. He turned … but saw nothing beyond the writhing of those damned orange plants.

The place, he decided, was starting to get on his nerves, and now his imagination was playing tricks on him …

Blue Omega One

VFA-44 Dragonfires

Eta Boötis IV

1412 hours, TFT

Commander Marissa Allyn brought her gravfighter into a steep climb as kinetic-kill projectiles, heated white-hot by atmospheric friction, stabbed down out of the sky and struck the sea in white bursts of vapor. Her ship vibrated alarmingly with the maneuver. Despite the advanced polymorphic hull, able to drastically reconfigure its shape according to mission or aerodynamic requirements from moment to moment, the SG-92 Starhawk had not been designed with atmospheric flight in mind. You could maneuver the thing with gravs, or you could use the change of airfoil shape and ailerons to maneuver against the airflow, but it was tough to do both.

Turusch fighters relied solely on gravitics for flight, whether in space or in atmosphere; those ugly, potato-shaped lumps were just about as aerodynamic as bricks.

There were three of the damned things on her tail at the moment. A particle beam seared past her head, the dazzling blue-white flash making her flinch. Lasers and charged particle beams normally were invisible in the vacuum of space; only in atmosphere did the beams draw sharp trails of ionization across the sky. In space, her IHD graphics showed the beams, but not with such eye-dazzling intensity.

Blinking, she told her AI to stop down the intensity of the light and kept hauling her Starhawk up and over in a hard, tight loop. The Toads tried to match her climb but were carrying too much velocity. She could see their hulls glow white-hot as they tried dumping excess speed. “Target lock!” she called. “Fox One!”

But that was her last Krait. “This is Blue One!” she called. “I’m dry on VG-10s! Three on my tail! Switching to beams and guns!”

“Copy that, Blue Leader! This is Blue Five! Got you covered!”

Blue Five—Lieutenant Spaas—dropped out of empty sky, trying to get on the one of the Toads’ six, the sweet spot directly behind its tail. The Turusch fighter broke left and Spaas followed, trying to get a clear shot.

Allyn’s missile twisted around, then arrowed almost straight down, striking the lead Toad and detonating with a savage, eight-kiloton blast that sent a visible shock wave racing out through the air. The outer skin of the Turusch spacecraft peeled away from the tiny, sudden sun … and then the entire craft disintegrated in a spray of metallic shreds and tatters as the fireball swelled and engulfed them.

The last Toad boomed through the fireball. Allyn completed her loop, rolling out at the top and entering a vertical dive. Her IHD slid a targeting reticule across the Toad, which was coming up at her from below, head-on. She triggered her particle beam an instant before the enemy could fire, sending a blue-white lance of energy stabbing into and through the Toad’s hull. The fighter came apart in glowing fragments; a half second later she plunged through the debris cloud, feeling the tick and rattle of fragments impacting across her fuselage.

“Scratch two Tangos!” Allyn yelled, adrenaline surging through her. Damn, she never felt this alive, save when she was turning and burning in combat. She hated that about herself.

“And scratch one!” Spaas added, as another nuclear sun blossomed in the fire-ravaged sky over Haris.

Allyn looked around, orienting herself. The dogfight, or part of it, had drifted down out of space and into Eta Boot’s atmosphere. They were over the day side of the planet, perhaps a thousand kilometers north and east of the Marine perimeter. “All Blue Omegas!” she called. “We need to work in closer to Mike-Red!”

Turusch fleet elements were attempting to keep the Dragonfires from engaging enemy positions around the Marine perimeter. The squadron actually had two mission elements—crippling the Turusch fleet as completely as possible before the Confederation carrier task force arrived, and taking some of the pressure off of the Marines. Of the two, the first, arguably, was the most important … at least that was what they’d told her in the pre-mission briefing.

Even so, the mission was pointless if the Marine perimeter collapsed before the America arrived. The Turusch were doing their best to keep the Dragonfires away from Red-Mike, and the volume of fire directed against the Mariners appeared to be growing more intense.

Fifteen kilometers away, a nuclear fireball consumed Blue Twelve.

If the surviving fighters could tuck in close to the Marines, perhaps the two might be able to support each other.

Blue Omega Seven

Eta Boötis IV

1415 hours, TFT

Gray had to rest.

The spider strapped to his back continued responding perfectly to his movements, adding its considerable strength to his own as he staggered across the alien landscape. The planet’s gravity continued dragging at him, however, until his heart was pounding so hard inside his chest he began to fear the possibility of a heart attack.

Theoretically, the med circuitry woven into his e-suit was supposed to monitor his health, and would inform him if he was in any real danger of hurting himself, but he wasn’t sure he trusted that technology yet. He stopped and leaned against a smoothly sculpted rock outcropping, breathing hard.

Again, something moved, half glimpsed out of the corner of his eye.

His rapid breathing was fogging the inside of his helmet, and he wasn’t sure he’d seen anything at all. Turning, he stared at the patch that had snagged his attention. What the hell was he seeing? …

They looked like shadows, each leaf shaped and paper thin, gray in color, each the size of his hand or a little bigger. They flitted across the orange vegetation as though gliding over it, traveling a meter or two before vanishing again among the weaving tendrils.

Again, Gray wished he’d understood—or paid more attention to—the briefings on the biology of Eta Boötis IV. Even if he’d ignored the canned downloads, Commander Allyn had gone over it lightly in the permission briefing. What he best remembered, however, was her stressing that the star Eta Boötis was only 2.7 billion years old … far too young to have planets with anything more highly evolved than primitive bacteria. Gray was no xenobiologist, but those … those things slipping and gliding over the orange plants, or whatever they were, looked a hell of a lot more advanced than any bacteria he’d ever heard about.

Were they dangerous? He couldn’t tell, but it did appear that more and more of them were visible from moment to moment, as though they were following him.

Or might they be some sort of Turusch or Sh’daar biological weapon? Not much was known about their technology, or about whether or not they might utilize organic weapons or sensor probes.

A rumble drifted out of the sky. He looked up, trying to penetrate the low, reddish-gray overcast, and wondered if that was thunder, or if it was the battle somewhere overhead.

Blue Omega One

VFA-44 Dragonfires

Eta Boötis IV

1418 hours, TFT

Commander Marissa Allyn brought her gravfighter into a flat, high-speed trajectory, hurtling low above the surface. The orange ground cover gave way in a flash of speed-blurred motion to bare rock. The surface for fifty kilometers around the Marine perimeter was charred black or, in places, transformed into vast patches of fused glass. Over the past weeks, since the Turusch had brought the Marine base under attack, hundreds of nuclear warheads had detonated against the Marine shields, along with thousands of charged particle beams. The equivalent of miniature suns had burned against that landscape, charring it, in places turning sand to molten glass.

She checked the tactical display for the entire squadron. Three of her pilots were still in space, tangling with Turusch fighters and a Romeo-class cruiser in low orbit. Four were in-atmosphere with her, forming up with her as she arrowed low across fire-scorched desert toward the Marine defenses.

“Mike-Red!” she called over the assigned combat frequency. “This is Blue One! Five Blue Omegas are coming at you down on the deck, bearing three-five-five to zero-one-zero!”

“We’ve got you on-screen, Blue One,” a calm voice replied over her com. “Come on in!”

“Just so you don’t think we look like Trash,” Allyn replied.

“Or Tushies. I think we can tell the difference.”

“Copy! Here we come!”

“Watch out for slugs,” the voice told her. “If you can drop some salt on them on the way in, we’d appreciate it.”

“Copy, Red-Mike. Five loads of salt on the way.”

Ahead, the Marine perimeter screen rose above the horizon, a pale, scarcely visible dome-shaped field highlighted by the sparkle and flash of incoming particle beams and lasers. According to her tactical display, the perimeter was still under attack by Turusch ground crawlers—fifty-meter behemoths code-named “slugs” by Confederation intelligence. Each was similar in appearance to a Toad fighter, but squashed, with a flat bottom that seemed to conform to the ground as it crawled over it. Turrets and blisters on the upper surface housed weapons emplacements, which were keeping up a steady fire against the Marine position. There were a dozen enemy crawlers out there, scattered across the burnt area on all sides of the Marine base.

She extended the sensitivity of her scanners, searching for hot spots—slang for any sources of electromagnetic radiation, including heat and radar. Large patches of scoured-bare rock and glass were radiating fiercely, glowing white-hot and molten in some places, but her computer began cataloguing possible targets out beyond the dead zone, where individual Turusch soldiers or combat machines might be gathering.

One Turusch ship, the Romeo-class cruiser, was almost directly overhead, three hundred kilometers out from the planet. It had been slamming the Marine perimeter with particle beams, but now appeared to be occupied by an attack from two of the Dragonfire fighters.

The five gravfighters all were out of Krait missiles by now, but they still had plenty of KK rounds, as well as power for their particle beam weapons. KK rounds—the letters stood for “kinetic kill”—were lumps of partially compressed matter, each the size of a little finger massing four hundred grams, steel jacketed to give the magnetic fields something to which they could grab hold. Hurled down a gravfighter’s central railgun at twenty kps, they released the energy of a fair-sized bomb on impact; the weapon could cycle seven hundred rounds per minute, or nearly twelve per second.

She had to slow sharply, though, to see the targets. Swinging left slightly, she watched the red diamond of the targeting cursor slide over the icon marking a Turusch slug at the very limits of visibility and triggered her cannon. Rapid-fire rounds howled from her craft, as her gravs kicked in to compensate for the savage recoil of that barrage. Ahead, rounds slammed into the Turusch crawler, sending up immense plumes of dust and dirt, then a fireball erupting, then immediately snuffing out in the oxygen-poor atmosphere.

The explosion an instant later flared white almost directly in front of her. She punched through the fireball, the shock wave jolting her fighter. Dropping her right wing, she jinked back to the right, targeting a second crawler, with a third five kilometers further off, on the bleak and fire-scourged horizon. Again, a stream of compressed matter shrieked from her high-velocity railgun.

High-energy particle beams probed and snapped past her head. The mobile fortresses were swinging their weapons to engage this new threat coming out of the north.

Blue Omega Seven

Eta Boötis IV

1429 hours, TFT

Gray felt something slap against the back of his left leg. He looked down, startled, and saw one of the dark gray leaf shapes clinging to his calf. He reached down and tore it off; it peeled away from his e-suit with a ripping sensation, like it had been clinging to him with suckers, and as he held it up, it twisted and writhed in his grasp. The underside of the creature was covered with tiny tube feet, like a starfish of Earth’s oceans, with a central opening like a sucker, ringed by rough-surfaced bony plates.

He threw the squirming leaf away, shuddering with a wave of revulsion. The thing reminded him of a terrestrial leech, but much larger and more active. The tube feet put him in mind of the far larger tendrils covering the swampy ground.

Three more of the things hit him in rapid succession, two on his lower right leg, one on his left hip. He could feel the rasp of those ventral plates, grinding against the carbon nanoweave of his suit.

Revulsion turned to gibbering panic. The atmosphere was toxic, and would kill him in minutes if his suit was breached. He ripped the creatures off and hurled them away. One, he saw, landed on its back three meters away, twisted over until it was upright, and immediately started gliding toward him once again. Dozens of the creatures were visible now in all directions, moving toward him with a fascinating deliberation.

He started to unsling his carbine, then thought better of it. There were too many of the things, and none was bigger than his open palm and fingers. Shooting them would be like solving a roach infestation one bug at a time. Five slapped against his legs and clung there, gnawing at his suit. With a scream, Gray peeled them off, terror yowling up from the depths of his mind. There were too many of them, coming too fast!

He started running.

His spider pumped and throbbed with his movements, giving him better speed than he could have managed on Earth, to say nothing of the Harisian high-grav environment. He stumbled, but he kept running, his boots splashing through shallow ponds and mudflats and the sea of soft-bodies, orange vegetation that weaved and twisted in front of him; and the shadow-creatures followed, hundreds of them now.

He was screaming as he ran.

MEF HQ

Mike-Red Perimeter

Eta Boötis System

1445 hours, TFT

“General?” Major Bradley said. “They’re ready to come through the screen.”

“Do it,” General Gorman said. “Watch for leakers and pop-ups.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

The gravfighters of VF-44 had completed three wide sweeps all the way around the Marine perimeter, smashing Turusch slugs and ground positions and even small groups of enemy soldiers wherever they could find them. Up in space, three hundred kilometers overhead, more fighters were slamming missiles against the defensive screens of a large Tush cruiser. For the first time in weeks, the Marine perimeter was not under direct fire, and the terrain surrounding the base was free of enemy forces.

He watched the main tactical display with its glowing icons marking the defensive dome and five incoming fighters. At a prearranged instant, one segment of the defensive screen wavered and vanished.

Energy screens and shields were three-dimensional projections of spacial distortion, an effect based on the projection of gravitational distortion used in space drives. Shields reflected incoming traffic, while screens absorbed and stored the released energy.

While screens were useful in relatively low-energy combat zones, they could be overloaded by nukes, and they weren’t good at stopping solid projectiles like missiles or high-energy KK rounds. With shields, incoming beams, missiles, and radiation were twisted through 180 degrees by the sharp and extremely tight curvature of space. Warheads and incoming projectiles were vaporized when they folded back into themselves, beams redirected outward in a spray of defocused energy. Warheads detonating just outside the area of warped space had both radiation and shock wave redirected outward.

As the ground around the outside of the perimeter became molten, however, some heat began leaking through at the shield’s base faster than heat-sink dissipaters could cool the ground. When the projectors laid out on the ground along the perimeter began sinking into patches of liquid rock, they failed. The enemy’s strategy in a bombardment like the one hammering Mike-Red was to overload the dissipaters and destroy the projectors.

The Marines were using shields and screens in an attempt to stay ahead of the bombardment, with banks of portable dissipater units running nonstop in the ongoing fight to keep the ground solid.

It was a fight they were losing.

“Perhaps it would be best to have these spacecraft remain outside the energy barriers,” Jamel Hamid said. “The Turusch could use this opportunity to—”

“I know what the enemy is capable of,” Gorman snapped. “Get the hell out of my way.”

He brushed past the civilian for a closer look at the 3-D display. One of the energy-shield facets—number three—winked off just ahead of the oncoming formation of fliers. The Starhawks glided across the perimeter, and the shield came up again behind them, flickered uncertainly, then stabilized. An instant later, a particle beam stabbed down from space. The Romeo had spotted the momentary breach and tried to take advantage of it with a snap shot, but the beam struck the shield and scattered harmlessly outward.

“Shit, that was close,” a Marine shield tech at one of the boards said.

“Cut the chatter,” Gorman said. “Watch those projectors.”

“Aye, aye, sir. Sorry, sir.”

One reason the beachhead had been set up on a rocky ridgetop was that molten rock tended to flow downhill, not up into the perimeter and the shield projectors. Repeated shocks against the lower slopes of the ridge, however, were threatening to undermine the perimeter. Gorman had already given orders to set out two replacement projectors, for number five and number six, placing them back a hundred meters as the ground sagged and crumbled beneath the originals.

Eventually, enemy fire would eat away the entire hill.

“Number four is failing,” the shield tech reported. “I recommend a reset.”

“How long do we have?” Gorman asked.

“Hard to estimate, General. An hour. Maybe two. Depends on how soon they resume the bombardment.”

Of course. Everything depended on the enemy. That was the hell of it. Gorman hated being trapped like this, stuck in a hole, forced to react to the enemy’s initiative, unable even to shoot back, since to do so the Marines had to drop one of the shields, which would mean a torrent of Turusch fire and warheads pouring through the gap.

The respite the Navy zorchies had brought the defenders was the first breather they’d had in weeks, but it wouldn’t be long before more Tushie ground units moved into the area and took the perimeter under fire … or until more capital ships moved overhead and started pounding the beachhead again with nukes and HE-beams.

“I still don’t see why you’re letting those fighters come inside the shields,” Hamid said. “They can’t do any good in here.”

“In case you weren’t paying attention, Mister Hamid,” Gorman said, choosing his words carefully, “those pilots have been giving the Turusch one hell of a fight. They’re out of missiles, and either out of or running damned thin on other expendables. They need to touch down and get their craft serviced. I imagine the pilots need servicing as well.”

“Perhaps they should land in shifts, then. …”

“Mr. Hamid, I’ve had just about enough of your second-guessing and carping. Get off my quarterdeck!”

“I remind you, General, that I am in command of this colony!”

“And I am in command of the Marine Expeditionary Force. Bradley!”

“Sir!”

“Please escort this civilian off of Marine property. If he shows his face around here again, he is to be placed under guard and confined to his quarters.”

“Aye, aye, General!”

“General Gorman!” Hamid said, his face reddening. “I must protest!

“Protest all you damned well please,” Gorman replied, shrugging, “just as soon as we get back to Earth!”

“Your anti-Islamic stance has been noted, General! Sheer antitheophilia! This will all go onto my report to my government!”

“Get him out of here, Major Bradley.”

“With pleasure, General! C’mon, you.”

Hamid started to say something more, seemed to think better of it, then turned and strode toward the CIC command center door. Bradley grinned at Gorman, then followed the man out. Hamid, clearly, was furiously angry, and there would be repercussions later. If there was a later. Gorman was willing to face the political fallout if they could just hang on long enough to get his people off this toxic hell-hole.

Gorman watched the civilian go, scowling. That crack about his being antitheophilic had been just plain nasty.

But, of course, the colonists on Haris were Refusers—the descendants of Muslims who’d refused to sign the Covenant of the Dignity of Humankind or accept the enforced rewrite of their Holy Qu’ran. Gorman, too, was a Refuser—at least in spirit. His church had accepted the Covenant, but many of its members had not.

Bastards …

The five Navy zorchies were settling in on the landing field now, the fighter icons gathering at the field’s north end.

“Carleton!” he growled.

“Yes, sir!”

“Get your ass down there and get Stores moving on those g-fighters,” he said. “I want their tubes reloaded and those ships ready to boost, absolutely minimum on the turnaround.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” his adjutant said, heading for the door.

Hamid had been right in principle, if not in execution. The faster they got those ships reloaded and out on patrol, the better.

Another nine hours before the naval battlegroup arrived.

It was going to be close.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.